


the good, the bad, and the smuggling

by Priestly



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, Banter, Bounty Hunter Rey (Star Wars), Canon-Typical Violence, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Fluff and Smut, Force Bond (Star Wars), Humor, Moral Ambiguity, Organized Crime, Pining, Porn with Feelings, Rivals to Lovers, Sexual Tension, Size Difference, Smuggler Ben Solo, Worldbuilding, and ben solo is deeply in love with that, rey is extremely competent
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-14
Updated: 2021-02-14
Packaged: 2021-03-18 06:20:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 24,032
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29238963
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Priestly/pseuds/Priestly
Summary: “I chase bounties,” she says, but the words sound distant. They’re merely noises, and they filter into his consciousness slow and muffled, like they’re traveling through water. Ben’s brain catches up to assign the sounds meaning. Right. He’s been effortlessly boarded by a bounty hunter and ship modder with a knack for tinkering and doing whatever the hell she pleases. “And I’m good at it,” she continues, looking around theFalcon’s communal space like it’s a room she’s rented. “I’ll get my end done. You’ll barely even know that I’m here.”—Ben Solo is a seasoned smuggler. He’s not bad at it, either. But when bounty hunter Rey offers him a temporary partnership he can’t refuse, Ben will find himself pushed to the limits of his skill, patience, and resourcefulness on a job that’s dangerous enough to be his last.Well, it's like his dad used to say: bounty hunters are nothing but trouble, kid.
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey, Rey/Ben Solo, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 24
Kudos: 46
Collections: To Find Your Kiss: The Reylo Fanfiction Anthology's Valentine's Day Exchange





	1. part i. setup.

**Author's Note:**

  * For [OccasionallyCreative](https://archiveofourown.org/users/OccasionallyCreative/gifts).



> Well, here it is. I tried to hit as many requested tags and likes as I could feasibly include, and this is the result: just over 24k of smuggler/bounty hunter rivals-to-lovers AU with enough banter, sexual tension, moral ambiguity, travel, size difference, and smut to whet the appetite. I really hope this scratches the itch!
> 
> If you're wondering whether the tagged OMC is some kind of relationship red herring - fear not! Nothing comes between Reylo but each other.

“What was that?”

Ben Solo pokes his head out from beneath the communal area of the _Falcon_ as the ship quakes, every loose tool, panel, and grate scraping against one another with a disconcerting metallic groan. When Ben gets no immediate response, he pockets his hand torch, heaves himself out, and heads for the cockpit. There he finds most of Chewbacca sticking out from underneath the main console, one furry leg bent as he works on the exposed set of wires dangling down centimeters from his face.

The ship gives another shudder, and Ben eyes the walls like he’s not sure they won’t cave in around them. 

“That’s still us, right?”

From underneath the console Chewie gives a grumble that still doesn’t answer Ben’s question. If it’d been another ship or debris that hit them, they’d know by now. He sits down in the pilot’s seat and pushes his safety goggles further back on his head to peer down at the monitors.

The readout’s the same the last time he checked: the computers still detect an electrical problem somewhere in the _Falcon_ ’s fuselage. With an old ship like this, sometimes diagnostics can’t get more specific and it becomes a matter of process of elimination. Tighten a few bolts here, tap on a few panels there. Ben’s a hell of a pilot but a mechanic he is not. It’s lucky for him that his first mate has more experience than he and his dad have combined. It’s a quality that’s proven invaluable on far more than one occasion, traversing the galaxy on a ship as tired as this one.

Finally, Chewie pulls himself out from under the main console only to throw his wrench down into the toolkit with a growl of frustration. Ben swivels his chair in Chewie’s direction, mouth pulling into a frown. Frustration out of the Wookiee is not usually a good sign, but in Chewie’s defense, they’ve already been at manual diagnostics for three hours, on and off, with little to show for it. The computer readout hasn’t changed since the ship forced a complete engine shutoff and now here they are, out of both lightspeed and sublight, just floating along at a gentle speed dictated by physics.

Chewie’s sitting up now, not really looking in Ben’s direction, arms braced on his bent knees. Ben sighs, removing his gloves a finger at a time to stuff into a vest pocket.

“Maybe we just… go over it again. Top to bottom, starting in the cockpit and working our way back. Got to be something we missed.”

Chewie says nothing. His defeat is palpable; they’re quickly running out of options.

They could hail the closest ship or cruiser and risk that cruiser belonging to the New Republic, who would surely ask questions about their cargo and heading. They could manually override the computer to restart the engines, head for the closest planet and risk more permanent injury to the ship. Or they could just keep meandering through the blank void of space as they’re doing now, eventually becoming fodder for an asteroid belt or an easy mark for roving marauders.

Each choice is more terrible than the last. It’s Ben’s duty as captain to see them safely to their next destination.

That, and his dad would never forgive him returning the ship in less than perfect condition. Even retired, fabled pirate Han Solo has a reputation to maintain among their cohort. 

The _Millennium Falcon_ is Ben’s rightful inheritance, but even properly bequeathed to him there’s something about the vessel that feels like it’s built from bones that aren’t his. His father’s very essence permeates every surface, catwalks to cannons. Ben’s felt it since he can remember, has felt it every day of his life since then. He tries not to think about it when the ship takes damage, but it’s there anyway, some kind of pulsing life force in the back of his mind that speaks in his father’s timbre: _she’ll hold together_.

When the _Falcon_ trembles a third time, it’s accompanied by a sharp, resonant scream that makes both Ben and Chewie turn their heads to the viewport in unison.

Ben knows that sound. It’s the sound of laser fire reflecting off the ship’s mercifully still-functioning deflector shields.

Chewie scrambles to his seat beside Ben, both of their hands flying across the console array to search for the source of the incoming fire.

No laser fire follows it. And no craft appears on radar. Ben and Chewie exchange a look.

They don’t have to wonder long before a scrappy little craft dips into view from above. It’s fast, agile, and far too small to be able to make it long distances. It makes tight hairpin loops in their viewport until its cockpit faces theirs. Ben can see a set of cannons equipped on either side.

He straightens, icy dread crawling down his spine. 

A warning shot?

Underneath the craft’s belly, a panel opens. _Missiles_ , Ben thinks. They’re hot, ready to launch at any moment. Deflector shields or no, they could do some real damage.

Whoever this is means business. 

The console beneath Ben’s hands crackles to life with an incoming transmission. 

_“Solo,”_ the voice announces. It’s light, playful. A woman’s voice. In a tone that suggests that maybe this is a warning after all. _“I’ve been looking for you for a long time.”_

Chewie looks in his direction, and Ben meets his eyes for a long moment, hands lifting in defeat. 

“Don’t look at me like that, I have no idea who this is!”

Chewie says nothing, just drops his eyes down to run any scans he can. Nothing turns up, not even a blip on the radar. The craft’s completely undetected. Ben acknowledges the findings with a twitch of his mouth, brows furrowing on his forehead. He hesitates a second before depressing the outgoing transmission button.

“Well, you found me.” 

Chewie turns to him again, slower, like he’d benefit from shutting up any time now. Ben just shrugs more aggressively, brows pinching tighter.

“ _Engine troubles?_ ” She questions, unaware of the disagreement taking place between pilot and co-pilot. “ _Something... electrical, crippling your engines. A full engine shutdown_.”

Ben sits up straight in his seat in recognition.

Their last job had gone off without a hitch. A few days ago, the _Falcon_ , holding secret cargo, touched down on the dark, uneven ground of loamy soil in the middle of the day. They’d waited for their contact, lowered the ramp, pushed the cargo out, got paid, then metaphorically shook hands for a deal settled. Couldn’t have been smoother. 

The trouble had been leaving. 

When Ben returned to the cockpit with their credits, Chewie was in his seat, ignoring the results of a lifeform scan in favor of aggressively jiggling switches. The ship’s engine started, then stopped. The lights flickered. Then, after a moment, a telltale whine emerged from the engine and it roared back to life like nothing had happened. On the scan, a lifeform had turned up, but it was there and then gone. At the time, Ben had chalked it up to a passing creature, something on wings. 

Now, though, he’s seeing that scan in a different light.

“That was you,” Ben says finally, leaning in like she’d be able to see the accusation in his posture. “ _You_ were the one that came up on the scan on Keldooine. You were watching us. You did something to this ship.”

For a second, the stranger says nothing. And then, irritatingly, she _laughs_.

It’s more of a chuckle, but it’s enough to make Ben’s fingers tighten into his palms. All the work and frustration and anxiety of floating helplessly through endless inky blackness and it wasn’t even their fault. 

All this for what, to get him alone? Helpless? Ben’s pride, normally hardy when it comes to his job performance, takes a hit now, thinking about how his vessel’s been violated and how that went thoroughly undetected until now.

“ _They say the reputation precedes the man but whoever ‘they’ are certainly never met you._ ” She almost sounds disappointed now. “ _I thought you were supposed to be clever_.”

Ah, a robust sense of confidence, thinking she’s got him pegged. Being underestimated has plenty of advantages, among them the ability for Ben to play along until he finds an opening to regain the upper hand.

“You’ve got the wrong Solo.”

There’s a brief pause, long enough that he starts to think he’s given up revelatory information here—not everyone in the galaxy seems aware the name Solo belongs to two different generations—but then the stranger goes on, airily, without missing a beat. 

“ _Well, Wrong Solo, you’re still a smuggler, right? I hope you like deals, because I’ve got one you will be_ very _interested in_.”

Here it comes. 

“ _I board your ship, find the little problem I’ve left for you and reverse it. No damage to your scrapheap here. No tricks. And in return, you help me out with a little job_.”

“Not much of a deal without specific terms. Are you new here or do you just think I am?”

“ _Don’t worry_ ,” she says, like she hadn’t heard him. “ _It’s not much out of your way. In fact, think of this as a temporary partnership, mutually beneficial for both parties_.”

“And if I refuse?”

“ _You won’t_.”

Ben takes in a half breath, loathing how well he’s been read, how easily he’s been backed into a corner. Because she’s right—he can’t refuse. Before he can pause to give Chewie an ounce of choice in the matter, Ben hits the transmission button again and leans in.

“Whatever you’re going to do, let’s get it over with.”

And then he reaches up, flipping switches to engage the _Falcon_ ’s docking hatch as the girl’s voice crackles through again.

“ _And please, don’t try anything. Neither of us wants to see your wings clipped for good._ ”

Sighing, Ben stands, hand tapping his blaster. Check and check. Outside the viewport, the tiny craft moves topside. He can hear metal whining from within the _Falcon_ , followed by more localized tremors that roll through as the other craft attaches itself to the top of the hull.

Chewie roars, and Ben raises his hand to either quiet or comfort him. He softens the harshness of the signal with a wave of his fingers. “There’s two of us and one of her. Right?” His eyes dart upward as though he can see the stranger’s craft latching on, but it’s out of view. “That thing’s too small for more than one pilot. It’s just one of her.” He nods. “And two of us. Standby.”

The common area of the _Falcon_ ’s still half of a mess, tools spilling out of their kits, floor panels askew. Before Ben can climb up the ladder to the hatch, it opens, and from above him emerge two booted feet from the darkness. A body comes sliding down after, the stranger gripping the outside of the ladder with both feet and hands, ignoring each rung in favor of skating down the metal and landing with a solid, muffled thud before Ben’s feet.

Startled, he staggers back, reaching for the blaster holstered at his thigh. The intruder whirls around and gets her blaster drawn first, pointing it square at his chest. As far as Ben can tell, it is a girl, but it’s hard to glean much else under layers of cloth and bits of mismatched plastoid armor. He can guess that she’s young, athletic, and, considering he now seems to be hostage on his own ship, not someone to underestimate.

“Just because you’re not clever,” she begins slowly, like she’s explaining astrodynamics to a child, “doesn’t mean you have to be stupid.” She flicks the end of her blaster down to Ben’s right thigh and Ben feels a grimace of a smile pulling at one side of his mouth. Maybe she does have him pegged already. Maybe he deserves this, being caught with his metaphorical pants down.

His hands raise, fingers towards the ceiling to indicate he’s empty-handed. This must satisfy her, because her posture changes, shoulders dropping slightly.

“Good. Weapon, please.” She holds out her hand. When he doesn’t comply immediately, she sighs, and from behind the opening in her helm, he can see her roll her eyes. “I’ll give it back eventually, I just need to know you can behave first before I let you walk around equipped with the ability to shoot me in the back.”

“Well, you _are_ on my ship,” he says, extending his blaster, grip first. He knows he’s still smiling, he can feel it pinching his cheeks. And even if he can’t see her face, he swears she’s smiling too. “Technically, I have a mandate here to protect my property.”

She ignores him, blaster lowering to waist level. She cants her head down the nearest passageway. “I know you have a co-pilot. He in there?”

For a moment Ben considers the wisdom of denial, but a 2.28 meter Wookiee can’t exactly hide under the console in the cockpit without at least one long shaggy limb being discovered.

“Chewie?” Ben licks his lips, hands lowering to his sides. “Come meet our new crewmate, would you?”

A moment later the Wookiee appears in the common area, bowcaster in hand and pointed in the stranger’s direction. But instead of being intimidated, this seems to only annoy her. She rolls her head and groans in exasperation. “Oh, come _on_!” The blaster in her hand—compact and one half of a matching set, he sees now, its partner strapped to her left thigh—is waved a little nonchalantly, and it makes Ben take a wary step to the side to avoid it. “Do you want me to fix your blasted ship or not? Can’t do it with a bolt in my chest, can I?”

Chewie’s bowcaster lowers. Ben gives the Wookiee an apologetic frown and shrugs helplessly.

Without another word, the girl moves to stride purposefully toward the back of the ship. Ben follows with Chewie close behind, still holding his weapon. She passes the engineering station and sublight engines, skating a hand along the surfaces with something akin to affection. Her fingers seem to find their mark because she stops suddenly, and without looking jabs an armored elbow against the corner of a loose panel. It pops open easily, revealing a messy arrangement of multicolored wires and dim lights. 

“See,” she says, turning to peer inside the open compartment, “a ship is much more than just fuel, an engine, and landing gear. Everything that takes in energy must expend heat. Too much heat, and your systems cease to function in order to protect themselves from permanent damage. Kind of like… a ship’s own immune system.”

Ben boggles. Is this stranger really lecturing him about the basics of engineering? On his own ship? Despite himself, there’s little annoyance, just fascination with the deftness of this girl’s hands: how she roughly yanks some hardware closer to her face only to soften her touch when she identifies something important. He finds himself moving closer to peer over her shoulder as she singles out one strand of golden wire and board fused in between two others. From her belt she produces an unfamiliar tool, strips the wire, makes a snip, and carefully unwinds the strands until it’s removed. Then the red wires get wound back together and returned like guts back into the belly of the beast. When she’s done she hops back to her feet, holding the shiny little interloper between a thumb and forefinger. Ben and Chewie both lean in closer. 

“It’s my design. Pretty, isn’t it? One of my proudest achievements, if I’m being honest. It tells your ship—incorrectly, of course—that your heat threshold is lower than it normally is, forcing it into a complete shutdown to preserve itself. Ah!” Around them, the ship seems to yawn, a whine winding up as electricity returns. “There it is!”

Lights blink back on overhead and all around. She takes in a little breath, almost in excitement. And if Ben didn’t know any better, he’d say whatever he’s experiencing right now is about the same.

He shifts on his feet. “That’s it? All those emergency warnings, just because of _that_?” The wire turns between her fingers, glinting at him mockingly, derisively. “No physical damage? Nothing permanent?” 

He reaches out without thinking, but the girl snatches the piece of wire away before he gets too close. “Well, of course.” She sighs like she’s disappointed it wasn’t obvious, and pockets the device in a pouch at her hip along with her tool. She shuts the open panel without looking. “I’m not going to damage the transport I need. That’d be a little counterintuitive, don’t you think?”

Ben can scarcely believe his ears. Had he really just been played, right into the hands of someone he’s never even met before?

Wait, _have_ they met?

Looking at her now, average sized—so at least a head shorter than him—no distinguishing features he can tell yet save for her unnervingly affable manner of speech, Ben can’t think they’re anything but strangers to one another. But even so, she also seems familiar, almost like someone he knew in another lifetime. Trying to place her makes him feel like he’s chasing an echo. 

He must take too long to think, because she stares at him and then clears her throat to break the silence with a casualness that makes his head spin. “Right. Now for the job I’ve hired you for—”

Ben abruptly cuts her off, one finger raised in objection to the brisk pace they’re moving.

“Hang on a second. _Hired?_ ” He repeats, incredulous. “Is that what we’re calling it? You’ve fixed my ship. Or returned it to its previous operating condition, more like, and thanks for that. What makes you think I won’t just kick you into an escape pod right now and forget the whole deal? Make this easier for everyone, but especially me?”

“You don’t have an escape pod, for one,” she returns, and Ben hates that she’s right, hates even more that her knowing this thrills him. She’s done her research on Corellian freighters. Or his, at least. “I’ve got my little ship attached to yours, for another—”

“Your little _craft_ , you mean.”

“—equipped with an EMP strong enough to _actually_ take your ship’s electrical systems offline. So you won’t be able to go anywhere without me.”

Ben eyes her for a long moment. Even if he can’t see much of her face other than her eyes, she seems just as confident as she had been on comms. Seeing no alternative, and unwilling to fight, he shrugs. What’s the harm in a little side job en route to his next mission? Just a few days’ detour?

“Seems you’ve got it all figured out. Well? What’s our job, then, first mate?”

Ben can feel his active first mate’s head swivel towards him and emit a high pitched howl of protestation. Before Ben can reassure him, she cuts in.

“Don’t worry, I’m not taking anybody’s job,” she says. “I have my own.” 

“And what is that, exactly?”

Without looking at him the girl walks between Chewie and himself, making her way toward the communal space, deftly side stepping each tool and grate Ben left askew earlier in his haste. After a beat, she lifts her arms to pull the plastoid helm off her head and leaves it on the Dejarik table. 

He nearly misses what she says next, dumbstruck by what he sees. A girl, he can definitely see now. His age —no, slightly younger—hair pulled back into a column of loose buns, eyes so sharp and hazel that he can see their forest green and amber brown from where he’s standing.

She’s stunning.

“I chase bounties,” she says, but the words sound distant. They’re merely noises, and they filter into his consciousness slow and muffled, like they’re traveling through water. Ben’s brain catches up to assign the sounds meaning. Right. He’s been effortlessly boarded by a bounty hunter and ship modder with a knack for tinkering and doing whatever the hell she pleases. “And I’m good at it,” she continues, looking around the _Falcon’_ s communal space like it’s a room she’s rented. “I’ll get my end done. You’ll barely even know that I’m here.”

Ben wants to challenge that notion, mutter something like _I really doubt that, considering_ , while gesturing broadly to the mess on the ground like it was all her fault to begin with, but what emerges instead is much more articulate and incisive.

“Oh,” he says.

She’s roving again, unmoved by Ben’s eloquence, peering over crates and at the subspace radio. When she reaches the extra pilot’s bunk, she presses her hand down on the mat as if testing its springiness. After, she perches herself on the edge looking mildly pleased with herself. Ben can’t blame her. She’s managed to do something nobody else in the galaxy has been able to since the Calrissians and Solos had taken over ownership of the _Falcon_. She’d been able to board and gotten Ben to agree to whatever she wanted, all on her own.

In a way, he’s rather in awe. And he can’t help but feel a little envious of such resourcefulness, of such a skillfully executed plan.

“So,” he begins, finally removing his welding goggles. “You mind telling me what I’ve just agreed to do for you?”

“It’s simple, really. You’re just letting me tag along on the job you’ve already taken.”

Ben’s eyes narrow slightly. “I’m not on a job.”

“Yes you are. You’re trying to find the man whose assignments you’ve made your small fortune on. You’re after your old pal Verrick. And so am I.”

The words hang in the air during the eerie silence that follows. Ben feels all the color drain from his face, something like panic creeping up his neck. His early warning system. But it isn’t alerting him of danger, exactly. This time it’s something else. He closes his eyes and shakes his head in disbelief.

“How…” he begins and tries again, firmer. “Nobody knows about that. Nobody but the two who fly this ship. _How_ do you know that?”

“I told you,” she says, voice lower now, serious. All playfulness disappears as her eyes go slightly wider and flash dangerously. She must know she’s unnerved him, know she really has the upper hand here and that she can walk all around the _Falcon_ like she owns it, because she very nearly does. “I’ve been following you for awhile.”

Trying to reach his former boss, a man of enormous wealth and no small amount of ruthlessness, isn’t easy. How’s he supposed to get to a self made crime king who essentially builds assassin droids as a hobby if Ben can’t even prevent his own ship from being infiltrated by a girl with scavenged armor? 

He’s stupid. So, so stupid.

“Verrick is an exceptionally hard man to get to, and those men carry a mighty high bounty on their heads. Thankfully you’ve worked with him, you’ve been to his compound. Means you can break in better than anybody else, and aren’t scared to try. You take me to Verrick. If you get me into a meeting with him, you can do…” she trails off here like she’s searching for a softer description of what she imagines, “...whatever it is you need to do. With him, his ships, his property. You can take off an arm as a souvenir, for all I care. As long as I get to take him back with me afterwards. Alive.”

Ben’s mouth goes dry, but from some corner of his chest he musters a still-functioning bit of black humor. “He’s only got one arm,” he says, smirking. “Lost the other to a terribly-programmed IG unit of his own making. Who’d have guessed, right?”

She doesn’t smile, obviously not appreciating the irony. A pity, because it _is_ pretty funny, objectively. Ben had himself a good snicker when he showed up after a successful job with Verrick’s credits just to find the man sweaty and disgruntled, wrestling with his brand new mechanical arm attached backwards (or sideways, it was hard to tell) that he did not bother to cover in synthetic skin.

“Anyway,” she says, uninterested in the diversion, “since we’ll be working together, you might like to know my name. I’m Rey. My ship up there’s called the _Goazon_. And you’re the son of Han Solo.”

Despite himself and the fact that he’s still reeling a little, he smiles, this time earnestly. “Ben,” he says with a nod.

“Ben,” she agrees with a mirrored smile.

They stare at each other for a long moment. Ben can feel his lungs expand and wonders why it’s suddenly harder to breathe naturally if he’s thinking about the process of it. The ins and outs of breath.

“If we’re working together,” he begins cautiously, “and I’m putting in most of the effort—if I may say, respectfully—I should get a cut of the profits.”

Rey, his new rival, answers quickly and decisively. “No.”

“No?”

“I really need the credits.”

Ben frowns dramatically and turns his hands out. “I’m still at a disadvantage here. I need another incentive to work with you that isn’t just ‘here’s your ship back, and everything’s okay, actually’.”

“Fine,” she sighs, eyes on the backs of her apparently exceedingly interesting gloves. “I can pay you a finder’s fee. Fifteen percent.”

“Thirty. It’s my ship and you need it.”

“Twenty.”

“Done.” As soon as opens his mouth he knows he should have waited more than a fraction of a second to respond, but there’s a growing glint in her eye he wants to pursue. “Deal?”

“Fine.” This time she’s looking straight at him.

For a while neither of them moves, the thick, tense silence of their staring contest only broken when Chewie growls and nudges Ben on the shoulder in order to move them away and out of earshot.

When they’re a few paces back, Chewie barks, a little sharper than Ben has heard him in awhile. Despite the kneejerk impulse to defend himself, Ben remains measured and understanding, knowing Chewie’s worries aren’t unfounded.

“I don’t _know_ how she found us. Obviously she’s been tracking us since we left Hutt Space.” It’s worrying, having a tail go completely undetected for so long, especially when they’re pretty careful covering their tracks. Little communication, supplies only acquired between jobs, never lingering in one spot for long. The kind of careful needed to be an independent smuggler in the underworld, the kind Ben knows his father rarely was. “But it’s never happened before, right? I don’t think odds are high anyone else can do what she just did.”

The Wookiee, eyes looking especially icy as they hold onto Ben’s, growls in a deeply sarcastic tone.

“I _don’t_ trust her! And I’m not—I’m not _ogling_ her.” Ben’s voice drops, cheeks heating.

Chewie says nothing.

“ _I’m not_. What was I supposed to do, keep playing games with her in the cockpit while her craft’s doing who knows what to our hull? If I didn’t let her in, we’d still be dead out here. At least now we know we don’t have to hope we fly right into a New Republic patrol and beg them for repairs and to not hail their commanders.”

At this, Chewie tilts his head down as a sign of concession. Neither of them can deny their luck has worn thin and that they never would have thought to check the heat exhaust vent, even when they were busy turning the entire ship upside down and inside out for the third time.

“And anyway,” Ben continues, mind racing toward the near future, “this is a good thing. The two of us alone on this job was risky, we both knew that. But her…” he wags his finger in Rey’s general direction, envisioning the shape of his personal mission now that there’s an extra body in the mix. And a capable one, at that. A little bounty hunter tinkerer who could help them get in close without being noticed. Ben turns his eyes back. “With her, we’ve got a wild card Verrick won’t see coming. If she can get the drop on _us_ , she can get the drop on _him_.” 

Ben’s speech, quickening with excitement, gets Chewie to straighten with a suspicious expression. His next purr is a gentle protest, one that Ben knows he doesn’t really believe.

“You and me?” He gestures between the two of them and their overly long, lanky forms. “Look at us, we wouldn’t know stealth if it blasted us on the forehead.”

When Chewie turns away with a solemn nod, Ben knows he’s bitterly won this particular battle. As far as first mates go Chewbacca is exceptional, rarely one to question or undermine Ben’s decisions even when things are at their most dire. What he once pledged to Han was no metaphor—he would keep the boy safe. No matter what. A Wookiee’s loyalty is an unbreakable oath. In times like these, when Chewie feels pressed enough to offer his deepest reservations, Ben knows to accept them at face value, to value the candor when it does come.

He does this with his own nod, reaching out to put a hand on the Wookiee’s upper arm, squeezing with reassurance. Ben’s brows raise. “We’ll be careful. Alright?”

To Ben’s right, something moves. The bounty hunter, Rey, returns to view, barely a pace away now. She looks between pilot and co-pilot, expectant.

“Oh, and as soon as you two are done deciding whether or not you can trust me—which, by the way, you have no choice—one more thing.” She holds up a food bar, one Ben recognizes as belonging to the _Falcon_ ’s own stores. One end is open, Rey already part way into it. “Providing dinner is a requirement of the job.” And like she can’t help but illustrate her point, she takes a hefty bite out of the thing, looking thoughtful as she chews.

“As I recall,” Ben exhales, lifting a brow, “you began your pitch by saying I’d barely even know you were here.”

Rey shrugs and swallows, looking pleased enough with what she’s eaten that she pulls more of the bar out of its wrapping. “That was before I knew you were flush with ration bars and capsules. It’s like a Galactic City cafeteria in here.”

At this, Ben’s eyes drop to her belt. He swears the pouch at her hip looks at least a little more full than when she first skated down the hatch. It’s stuffed to the brim with stolen food capsules, no doubt. Rey turns away before Ben can inquire, and at her back he can’t help but call out, a little more aggressively than necessary, “Those pack enough calories to feed an adult Wookiee, by the way!”

Unimpressed with his trivia, she flops onto the extra bunk and stretches her legs out on the pale surface, appearing committed to consuming the entirety of a bar meant to be eaten over two or three days. She crosses her legs and lays Ben’s blaster beside her, in plain view. 

Rey looks right at home.

When Ben turns back to Chewie he tries to avoid his eyes, ducking the warning he knows is there, echoing his father.

 _See, kid_ , Chewie’s expression says, and somehow Ben hears it perfectly in his dad’s voice. _I told you. Bounty hunters are nothing but trouble._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you know more about engineering than I do: first, forgive me, and second, feel free to offer your observations and corrections. Thanks for sticking around!


	2. part ii. plan.

“We’re going _where_?”

Ben and Chewie both lift their heads from where they’re stooped at the computer to peer over both their shoulders. Their resident mynock and bounty hunter pads her way into the cockpit with barely a sound, her eyes surprisingly bright and alert. 

“Back among the living? Wasn’t sure when you’d be joining us.” He pauses and tips his head with a wry smile. “ _If_ you’d be joining us.”

She squints at him, wearing a patronizing, tight-lipped smile.

A few hours ago, Rey, three-quarters of the way into her pilfered food bar, took up residence on the pilot’s bunk to watch as Ben and Chewie returned the _Falcon_ to its natural state. Tools were gathered, wires and electronic chips returned to their little resident cubbies. Once Ben finished the solder job he’d left half done, he lifted himself out from beneath the common area floor panel and had not been entirely surprised to find the bounty hunter with her head hanging forward, seemingly asleep. He stared for a time, debating on his commitment to her personal comfort, and after a moment’s deliberation dropped the floor grate heavily into place, letting the metal reverberate all through the common area with a thunderous clang. The sound jolted Rey awake, hand clutching what remained of the food bar. The momentary terror on her face was almost enough to flush out some of his guilt, but she fell back asleep again almost immediately after. By the time Ben stowed the toolbox she found herself a better position: splayed on her back, limbs askew. Rey had not uttered a peep until now.

“I might’ve overdone myself,” Rey offers casually.

Ben turns back to the console, his smile a little more triumphant now. “I tried to warn you. Those things are meant to feed a humanoid three times your size.” 

He can feel her presence sliding in between the two pilots, her hand gripping the back of Ben’s seat. He swallows.

“So. What’s our heading?” she repeats, seemingly unfamiliar with the star system pulled up on the display. 

Ben pauses a moment and considers how detailed he should be in his answer. “I’m meeting someone,” he says finally. 

“Oookay.” Rey’s eyeroll is nearly audible. “I tracked you in space with minimal effort. You think I can’t figure out where we’re going next?”

Ben’s mouth presses into a tighter line. Why he thought a nap would soften her bite, he doesn’t know. “While you were sleeping off your caloric overload, I got in contact with an old friend of Verrick’s. A gunrunner, deals in Imperial artifacts and particular weaponry, mostly. Supplied some of Verrick’s personal collection.”

“And? I’m guessing they’re no longer friends.”

Ben tilts his head. “Let’s just say there’s no love lost between a supplier and a man whose arm got taken off by said supply.”

Rey snorts a little laugh, and the sound drips something warm into Ben’s stomach. He supposes she will be able to appreciate the irony of Verrick’s missing arm yet.

“What does he have that we need?”

Rey’s word choice feels specific. That _we_. He decides to run with it.

“Well, three of us won’t stand a chance running headlong into Verrick’s militia of assassin droids, no matter what we’re armed with. We’ll need something to disable them instead.”

“Disable?”

Ben nods and leans back a little. 

“What I’m hoping to secure from my contact is a weapon, a cannon that emits small electromagnetic pulse bombs. If we get close, if I go in first. I talk to Verrick alone, get him to think I’m desperate for work. Then we cause a distraction, probably overriding his security system. Droids are deployed in the main room and go toward the back door, we trap them in a passageway, then Chewie unloads with the cannon.”

Rey blinks at him, expression blank, like this is the stupidest plan she’s ever heard and it hardly deserves further response. 

“Fine, so it’s a work in progress!” He snaps. It’s not _that_ bad. He’s got others.

“So,” she begins slowly, her eyes narrowing minutely. “It’s an EMP.” She stares at him, head cocked, expectant. Maybe she developed a crick in her neck when she decided to drop her guard and take a nap on the ship she’d taken hostage.

Ben goes quiet a second, eyes shifting back and forth in thought. “Yes? That’s what I just said.”

She groans. “ _Hello_ , were you even listening to me?” she says, half exasperated. “My ship’s rigged with an EMP device. Big enough to take out a ship twice the size of this garbage heap, if necessary. Wouldn’t be hard to boost it, increase the blast radius enough to take out a whole wing of a little smuggler hideout.”

Huh. Well that’s something.

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” he chuckles wryly, “but part of me thought you’d been bluffing about having that capability.”

Rey’s eyes really narrow now as she shakes her head at him. “You thought I was bluffing and you still let me board your ship? You really aren’t very clever at all, are you, Solo?”

Despite the harsh words, Ben can’t help but smile and he’s not really sure why. Warmth settles in his gut. Rey straightens and Ben swivels in his seat.

“Call off your deal,” she says decisively. “We won’t need it. I’ve got something better.” Her eyes go a little unfocused, like she’s reading a supply list on an invisible HUD. Making calculations. She nods. “I’ll need time to tinker, though.” She turns away, beginning to head down the passageway back to the common area, but then rounds swiftly on her heel, the movement a little dramatic. “And a hand. If you’re at all good with a wrench.”

Ben can feel Chewie’s eyes on him, though he doesn’t need to look to know it.

“I’ve got two hands to hold things and one brain to follow directions.”

The look on her face is something yet unseen, a mixture of amusement and confusion. Maybe his easy agreement comes as a surprise because she doesn’t say anything else, just turns and disappears around the corner.

Ben must watch her go a beat too long because Chewie rumbles a questioning purr.

“Well, that’ll save us a pretty credit, won’t it?” Ben sighs, and Chewie growls in agreement. “And a headache.”

Ben’s got a long, long list of underworld scum to avoid making deals with, and gunrunners make it pretty high up there. They tend to be violent and creepy to start, but negotiating to buy a highly illegal and hard to procure weapon comes at a hefty cost. He’d managed to talk his contact down from the original price with plans to take it down more, but it was going to hurt no matter what they’d have agreed to.

“Let’s see if we can get back in touch. Convince him we found a better deal. It’ll make him think he’s got a competitor. Bet he’ll knock a good chunk off the sum, too.”

Ben’s contact does, in fact, knock a good chunk off his original sum. For awhile Ben plays up the angle, affects a soft, indecisive manner only to become more firm when it doesn’t sound like he’s taken seriously enough. When Ben becomes decisively immovable, out comes the singsongy, honeyed cajoling, the price falling in steeper steps the longer Ben keeps him talking. The manipulation is so easy, so plainly obvious that Ben can’t help but enjoy himself. For the most part, this is a necessary skill to abuse in his line of work, but there are times like now that Chewie gives him lingering sidelong glances, as if unsure whether Ben knows when to stop.

He knows this is a skill his father never bothered to practice, but then again, in Ben’s case it's always been less about practice and more a natural instinct that allows him to run circles around the dim-witted. And the ease of it, he’ll be the first to admit, is fun.

Eventually Ben promises his contact he’ll come calling again soon for a different store of weapons, that he’ll get back in touch when he needs to arm himself for his next big job. It’s a lie—more blasters are never the answer—but it’s what Ben needs to end the conversation on a high note, sitting back in his seat with a heavy sigh. Whatever disappointment his contact experiences, he’ll deal with later.

With one deal called off without incident, Ben heads down the passageway back into the communal area. There he finds Rey sitting cross-legged on the ground, datapad projecting a three-dimensional schematic for something Ben doesn’t recognize. The glowing map is interrupted by wafts of steam coming off a tall cup Rey has sitting on an electronic burner. It’s a small cooking set, meant for one person who’s often on the move. Ben inhales, recognizing the bitter scent immediately. 

“Caf?” he says, not really asking.

Rey doesn’t look up, busy enlarging one part of the mechanical design, but she does eventually give him a nod. “The secret to waking up,” she confirms and pauses before she touches the cup to her mouth. “What, do you want some?”

For some reason the idea of his new resident bounty hunter offering him a drink from her own mug gives Ben pause, and he has to really think about his answer before responding.

“Maybe next time.”

“Good,” she smiles, “because I haven’t got enough for two.”

Ben can’t help returning the smile. He nods to the schematic instead. “Is this your EMP device?”

Rey nods, sweeping her hand out so that the view pulls wide and the device is displayed in full. “It’s built into the back of my ship, set just in front of the engine. It uses some fuel to power the initial blast. Helps that I’m not using any of my own right now.” On the projection, the engine becomes highlighted in yellow, the entire schematic rotating gently on an axis like a planet orbiting a sun. “It can be accessed entirely from the interior of my ship.”

The pieces start clicking into place. Rey shifts her weight, leaning an elbow on the knee closer to Ben. “You’ll have to come up into the ship with me. Bring that power calibrator and hydrospanner you had out when I boarded.” She shakes her head as she thinks. “Actually, just bring your whole toolkit.” She pockets the little cooking pad in a pouch and stands, mug of caf in one hand, tablet in the other.

Ben’s eyes narrow in recognition. “Is that… my datapad?”

“Mm,” she confirms lightly, like he remarked on the pleasantness of the weather and she’s merely agreed that yes, the sunshine breaking through the clouds is indeed a nice change after so much rain. “Not using it, are you?” And then she walks right by him towards the hatch without waiting for an answer.

Whatever he’d done today, yesterday, or in the past year, Ben’s not sure this isn’t exactly what he deserves. Smuggling’s not a neat and tidy profession; he’s left more than one prospective buyer holding the bag, though proudly, he’s never screwed people over at the rate his father enjoyed. (Han Solo, legend has it, broke as many deals as he did hearts.) In general, Ben likes to avoid conflict where necessary, because business is easier when parties don’t have reason to shoot one another in the back. This means he’s known as being a quick and mostly honest dealmaker, but the truth is more that Ben is an opportunist: he takes in a situation, analyzes it, then lets his instincts guide him to adjust the conditions in his favor. 

Though he’s only spent hours with Rey, Ben knows she’s the same as he is. The galaxy balancing itself, in the way Ben’s uncle always talks about. It’s just deserts for Ben to have been taken advantage of in the way he always takes advantage of others, really. Rey saw an opening to exploit and took it.

It’s this thought that accompanies Ben as he retrieves his toolkit and ascends the ladder to enter Rey's ship. As he does, he imagines the bounty hunter waiting in ambush for him, but when he pokes his head up into the attached spacecraft the moment does not come.

Instead, he’s met with quite a remarkable sight.

The interior of Rey’s craft should, by his account, not have much more room than the inside of a couple of Republic A-Wings: one seat for the pilot, their legs, some cargo room behind, and not much else. What Ben sees instead is a substantial space that looks like nothing else he’s seen before, like it’s been cobbled together out of three or four different ships instead. It’s got a higher ceiling than expected, almost enough for him to stand in. In the fore, an angled viewport and comfortable pilot’s seat. Behind it, a space big enough for someone of Rey’s size to sleep in. And aft is the EMP, an arrangement of metal and wire and brackets set into the hull that seems to spill out into the exterior of the craft.

As amazing as the craft is in structure, what he’s taken by is everything else. The mismatched boxes and tiny crates by the seat, the bedroll neatly tied up in the space behind it, the panel built into one of the side walls with dozens of little lines scratched into the metal, arranged in haphazard rows.

It’s a space big enough to live in because Rey probably does live in it.

When Ben raises himself fully into the cockpit, he finds himself half crouched just to fit. So maybe it’s not so big a space after all.

Rey, busy examining different angles of the projected model from his datapad, finally turns to look at him from where she’s seated with an expression that is nearly sympathetic. 

“You’re not meant for small spaces,” she observes. “You look a bit like a rancor in a cantina.” She nods, matter of fact. “Out of place.”

Ben frowns, less at Rey and more from the effort of trying to find a reasonable position to stand in. If he hunches a little more, maybe? He scowls at the state of the ceiling and the imposition on his comfort. 

“No,” he agrees, and giving up, falls into a crouching position, “I was never too excited by the prospect of spending most of my waking hours in a one-person cockpit.”

“Being a New Republic pilot wasn’t in the cards for you? Why, too cramped?”

“No. Too boring.”

Rey looks at him with open curiosity. Ben gives a wry smile. 

“I know you don’t have much cause to believe me at this juncture, but I _am_ a good pilot,” he says. “You laugh, but I am.”

“It’s not that I don’t believe you,” Rey returns, still laughing, “the entire galaxy knows all about the _war hero_ stock you come from.” She laces the phrase with a special edge of sarcasm. Ben doesn’t take offense. “It’s funny. You called it boring, but you just traded one dangerous, uncertain life for another.”

For a moment, Ben goes very still, like if he moves too quickly Rey will be able to cut him right open with another sharp observation. He swallows, mouth tightening, and says nothing. 

Rey’s voice softens. “I suppose we all make the choices we need to to survive.”

She looks down at the hologram floating at chest level, but her eyes are unfocused, like she’s seeing something beyond its glowing lines, ghosts Ben can’t. For the first time since she insinuated herself into his work, he considers the very distinct possibility that life up until this point has not been kind to her. He can only imagine that bounty hunting, like smuggling, is equally the dangerous, uncertain life Rey described. With over ten years of experience, Ben can say with certainty that these livelihoods attract a certain kind of personality: people who are canny and resourceful and quick-witted—but who are also bold risk takers and don’t fear personal injury. Ben can check most of those boxes. But those at the top of the underworld are even more of a stereotype: imposing, single minded, and ruthless. Rey is none of those things, doesn’t seem capable of them. They aren’t qualities that apply to Ben either. It occurs to him that maybe the two of them are destined for the middle of the pack in their respective fields—too smart for the bottom rung, but not cutthroat enough to ascend to the top of the ladder. 

Despite ambitions, Ben’s fine with that. The sacrifices required to rise to the top are not monetary and Ben’s unwilling to make them. Rey must be fine with this status too, considering the meagreness of her belongings and the mercy of her hands. 

“Is that what you’re doing?” Ben nods in the direction of the bedroll, at the well worn pack beside it that he can only guess contains personal effects and essentials. “Just out here surviving?” But as soon as it’s out of his mouth, he regrets it. Regrets it even more when Rey’s expression changes, her eyes hardening. Her lips pull back, showing a bit of teeth. Baring her metaphorical fangs at his carelessness.

“You don’t get to judge me.” She gives the barest shake of her head, eyes narrowed. She slows her speech to let every word land harder. “You don’t know the first thing about me.”

Even if Rey packs that sentence with force and weight, it doesn’t feel true. They ring hollow in this cockpit-cum-living-space, at how much of her life he can glean from just looking at her and the space she lives in. But Ben can feel the way her hackles raise, and pushing back seems like an especially stupid move. He suddenly gets the sense that he’s some kind of woefully unprepared hunter stumbling headfirst into a krayt dragon’s den. 

His shoulders set and he shakes his head, eyes closing in regret. “No, you’re right. I don’t.” He thinks about the way she got a blaster on him as soon as she stepped foot on the _Falcon_ , about how she helped herself to the food stores when he wasn’t looking and then fell asleep on the bunk, curled up around herself. How small she looked then, how out of place, facing the wall with her back to him. “But I think maybe we both understand what it’s like to not know a safe place to plant our feet.”

Now it’s Rey’s turn to go quiet. Ben thinks he sees a storm brewing inside her, somewhere behind the green of her eyes. The more he opens his mouth, the more he provokes even without meaning to. Ben might have inherited quite a few helpful traits from his parents, but the gift for gab from either side of his lineage completely passed him by. Sitting beside the panel marked with bits of solder, Ben raises his hand and touches one of the marks. He can only guess what Rey’s keeping count of. They both go quiet.

“Doesn't it get lonely?” He asks after some time, turning his head to look through the cockpit and out the viewport. Nothing but the nose of the _Falcon_ and a carpet of stars beyond. “Not much room in here. Just you and your thoughts.” 

Rey’s gaze follows his. “I don’t know,” she returns, shrugging. She sounds far less heated now. “It’s not so bad. It’s not lonely, it’s...just enough. Comfortable. And it’s mine. I’ve got all the stars for company no matter where I go. Nothing left to want.” There is a real wonder in what she says. “But you, that’s different.”

“Why would it be different?”

“Bit of a large ship for just one or two. That’s too _much_ room, isn’t it? Too many corners, too much cold and empty space. Now that’s lonely.”

A memory suddenly floats up to the forefront of Ben’s mind, unbidden. He was a child, five, maybe six years old and lucky enough to be able to tag along with dad on some kind of routine errand. His father and Chewie looked regal in their respective seats, Ben perched on a passenger’s chair meant for an adult three times his size. He watched in wide eyed amazement as their practiced hands floated across the console, flicking switches and adjusting levers like their fingers were dancers. The rhythm of flight fascinated Ben, as much enamored with the balancing of the ship’s systems as the manual takeoff and landing. Partway through the trip a minor disaster struck, a console warning blaring and flashing a dangerous red. His dad leapt to his feet, yanked open a panel above him and started pulling at wires, calling frantically to Chewie over his shoulder. When Ben cautiously approached from behind to offer the last tool he’d seen being used—a soldering iron—his dad snatched the dangerous thing out of his hand a little too roughly, and in a barely controlled voice asked him _to sit back down in the back, would you? And try not to touch anything._ Ben did sit back down, all the way in the hold of the ship, arms around his knees for so long that he began to shiver from cold. Chewie found him after that, hidden in his favorite nook. The Wookiee lifted him effortlessly into his arms, Ben throwing his own around his friend’s great, furry neck to warm the chills away.

Ben learned not to intervene after that. 

His mouth pulls back now into something akin to a frown. He considers whatever stories Rey might know about his dad and how well those would hold up against the reality. Not a smuggler or a pilot or Rebellion war hero, just a man with a Corellian freighter, a son, and more debts than he could ever pay off.

“I’m used to it,” Ben says finally, and he’s proud that he sounds less emotional than he feels. Despite that, Rey looks at him with something like sympathy, and after a moment pulls out a tool from the kit behind her. It’s a wrench, and she holds it out to him wearing a softened expression.

“Alright. Let's test this hypothesis of you being a dutiful direction-follower.” She throws him a smile, and Ben can’t help but feel like it’s some kind of peace offering, an agreement to work together towards the same destination.

* * *

The same destination, it turns out, doesn't necessarily mean that peace is a given.

Ben _is_ listening, he is. And as promised, he’s following directions. He holds bolts as she tightens them, or relays patterns of flashing lights as she works on reprogramming electronics. But either he’s not adept at taking direction or Rey’s not used to doling it out, because there’s a kind of push and pull that Ben didn’t anticipate. What he imagined as a grand gesture of good faith seems more like an obstacle the longer he works, Rey releasing grunts or sighs of frustration when his knowledge of engineering falls well short of hers.

It doesn’t help either that Ben’s hands, wide and clumsy, just can’t be as precise inside the cramped space of the machine the way Rey’s slender and nimble ones can.

“No, the _red_ wire,” Rey repeats, as though emphasizing the color will suddenly catalyze a grand epiphany.

“I heard you,” Ben returns, voice even, “but I’m looking at _four_ red wires.”

Rey’s on one end of the EMP device and Ben on the other, but even if they’re looking into the guts of the same machine, their views are opposite. There are handfuls of wires and electronic boards between them, but there’s also just enough space between everything that Ben can see through the other side, at the way Rey rolls her eyes in frustration. She tugs on something on her end so it can be identified on his side and unplugged. 

“I’m pulling on it now.”

Ben watches two bundles of wires move as a collective, making his job not at all easier. He does not release the sigh sitting inside his lungs and credits himself for his patience. He must take too long to react because Rey suddenly gets to her feet and walks around to his side, then drops to her knees beside him to crane her neck closer. He’s able to concentrate enough despite her proximity that he can gesture vaguely and awkwardly to what he’s looking at, cheeks burning. “Four red wires,” he says, helpless.

“That’s orange. So is that and that.” She pulls on the slack in the wire enough to bring them into the light, where they still look as close to red as they had in the dark. “See?” And then without waiting, she grabs the single, allegedly red culprit and unplugs it. When she does, her arm brushes his and he makes sure to keep facing forward and not in her direction. Then she gets up and claps a too-warm hand on his shoulder, patting him a couple of times in sympathy. It lingers and something in Ben burns hotter, made worse by the playfulness in her voice. “Don’t worry. We’ll teach you your colors yet.”

Ben wishes like hell he could at all loosen the collar on his shirt, but it doesn’t offer more give. Earlier, under the steadily increasing heat, Ben made the decision to shed some clothes. First the vest, draped over a storage crate. Next his shirt sleeves, rolled back to his elbows. In his defense, the craft is a small space—he overheated within minutes. Rey, seemingly mirroring him, removed most of her armor and outer layers too, leaving planes of tanned and freckled skin exposed. On her shoulder, he spots a thin scar. She must spend just as much time planetside as she does in space; the imperfections are proof of that. It’s hard not to notice those, or the way the hair falls from her neat row of buns, loose tendrils of hair sticking to the back of her neck. He’s possessed by an urge to brush them free, but tightens his grip on the wrench in his hand instead.

“I guess I should have paid more attention to electronics and less to flying techniques.” He pulls fruitlessly on the bib of his shirt and then, frustrated, drags the back of his hand across his brow.

Rey takes a second to let her eyes drag over him, and he swears he sees her bite her bottom lip. “You’re not doing too bad, actually. It took me years to teach myself all this.” When she pokes her head in again, he hears the _clang_ of metal meeting metal, and after a second, she removes the whole panel that served as the divider between each of their sides. She props it in front of them and taps at it like she’s communing directly with the circuits. With how fluidly she’s able to make quick work of this modification, she practically does speak a different language. It’s a marvel to watch and to take part in. Even better with such a clear view, Rey right beside him. He sees her hands move and remembers the amazement he felt as a kid. Fingers like dancers.

He watches her work for a moment, and then: “You taught yourself all this?”

She nods, and he swears he sees something flit across her face that could be read as sadness, or maybe regret. He wonders if it’s a sign he should be leaving things well enough alone, but the air changed in the cabin sometime within the past hour or two. Ben can’t explain it other than the sensation of deflector shields lowering. 

A metallic groan resonates from one corner of the vessel, signalling the opening of both hatches. A moment later, one half of Chewie’s face appears, his shiny black nose poking over the lip of the hatch. He rumbles a soft howl in greeting and Ben smiles. “Already bored down there without me?”

Chewie chirrs ( _Just making sure you’re still alive since you’re lying about how well you take directions_ , he says, loosely translated) and when Rey joins him in laughing, Ben quickly cranes his head up to peer at her. “You can understand Shyriiwook?”

“Yes,” she says, cautious. “Doesn’t everybody?”

Pilot and co-pilot both fall silent, and Rey looks between them with growing confusion. “What?”

Ben doesn’t answer and doesn’t know how to relay how very few people in the galaxy have the opportunity or motivation to understand the Wookiee spoken language. Before he can figure out how to ask about her fluency, Chewie lifts himself up on a few more rungs, slides a metal tray with two lidded cups onto the floor, and pushes it a short distance in their direction. His eyes linger on Ben’s state of undress, and without saying anything more, just shakes his head and lowers himself back down the hatch and out of sight.

She approaches the tray Chewie left behind like she expects to find hidden dangers in the utensils. Cautiously, she lifts the lid off and takes a sniff. Apparently it’s to her liking because the expression that follows is one of bliss. Her eyelids flutter closed, and each corner of her mouth pulls back in a smile, chin raising slightly.

“What is this?” she asks, and closes her eyes for another long, equally enjoyable inhale.

Ben, happy to just watch her pleasure unfold, takes a few seconds to answer, unwilling to break the moment with the timbre of his voice. “Cloudberry blossom tea. Probably.”

“Probably?”

“Can’t tell from here. But judging by your reaction.”

Instead of moving back to her designated station, Rey settles down cross legged right where she is, holding the cup between both hands like it’s priceless. Then she takes a small sip, eyes closing. “Oh, this... this is good. Is it something Wookiees make on their home planet?”

“I don’t think so. Something Chewie’s picked up sometime in the past one hundred and fifty years, give or take. It’s nice when it’s cold.” 

Rey drinks again, in earnest this time. Seizing the opportunity to be close, Ben joins her, knees knocking awkwardly with each other as he attempts to mirror her position. His size seems so obvious now that he’s seated beside her. Though she clearly doesn’t find him intimidating—she didn’t so much as blink when she first dropped into the _Falcon_ , blaster trained on him in the space of a breath—he wonders if he’s somehow off-putting in other ways instead.

Then again, she had been crouched next to him not a moment ago. And she’s sharing her space with him now. All her space. Personal and otherwise.

He reaches for his own mug to silence the agitated storm of his thoughts. It’s cool to the touch. The _Falcon_ ’s cool against the warmth of the _Goazon_. When he takes a drink it brings a little wave of relief, partially from its temperature but mostly due to the sweet, floral property of the blossom itself. He’s almost forgotten how overwhelming the scent is when drunk, how nice it feels to have the senses overwhelmed by something pleasant. The tea has the effect of slowing the imbiber down, making them present, if only for the moment. Ben can almost remember the first time he tasted it as an adult, though he imagines the reaction on his face then was nothing like how it looked on Rey just now.

Euphoric. At peace with the galaxy.

They drink in silence for a few moments, the sound of machines rising to fill the space. But it’s not the oppressive quiet that accompanies many long and boring hours of space travel, nor the frustrated tension from earlier. Instead, it’s agreeable. Almost companionable. Before long, Rey reaches into the pouch at her hip and removes a food bar. She unwraps it slowly like she’s measuring it for size, then snaps it at roughly the two-third mark and extends the larger piece in Ben’s direction.

“I get more?”

“Course. You’re bigger than I am.” She turns her head toward him with a fond smile as she says it, and Ben feels liquid warmth course through his chest.

Though he’s not too hungry—hard to work up an appetite when the heart does the things it’s been doing the past while, thumping and flipping around maniacally—Ben accepts the proffered ration with a barely suppressed smile. 

“Bold of you to offer me my own food,” he says, pointing upward to indicate their surroundings. “In your craft like I’m enjoying your hospitality.”

“Well,” she begins, and breaks off the smallest bit at the end of the bar, “better to share the wealth of resources you’re sitting on, don’t you think? Preferable to me just taking what I need, even if you won’t miss it.”

Ben’s halfway through chewing the not-very-exciting bit of food bar he’s bitten off. He forces it down as he always does and wonders how earlier, Rey managed to eat the whole damn thing with a smile on her face.

“It’s hard,” he surmises. “Always having to take things instead of having them offered to you.” He says that as a man with nothing to want, as someone who gets to follow his desired career path, to _choose_ what he does with his time.

His voice is quiet, and so is hers. She looks at him now with an openness that nearly frightens him. “It’s like you said, Solo. What I’m doing: just out here surviving.” 

Ben feels something twinge in his gut with that. He opens his mouth to say something, but finds the right arrangement of words have not loaded into his tongue yet. Was that what she saw? Just a man crawling into another person’s personal living space, making broad judgments about her life with so little context? How reductive his observation must have seemed to her; the flash of anger she’d unsheathed like a knife had been more than justified. 

He shakes his head. “I shouldn’t have said that.”

“No,” she agrees quickly, but then offers a halfhearted shrug. “But you’re not wrong, either.”

It doesn’t make him feel any better. And he figures maybe it’s not supposed to. Maybe he’s supposed to settle happily into his side of the agreement with this bounty hunter who managed to take the upper hand before he’d even noticed her presence. This partnership, such as it is, benefits Rey most of all, but their working together hinges on the idea of mutuality and trust. Trust that she will keep her end—and that he won’t take an opportunity to upset the balance. 

Looking at Rey now, he can tell she’s holding little fear. Her muscles are loose, posture relaxed. She looks comfortable, as comfortable on her own craft as she was on the one she momentarily held hostage. Rey rifled through his property, dipped into his supplies, made herself at home on the _Falcon_. And Ben let her.

“Let me ask you something,” he says and swallows hard. “Earlier you’d said I didn’t have a choice about trusting you. But you do.” Ben lets that linger a second, but when she doesn’t look up from the cup in her hand, he presses on. “You fell asleep on my ship. For hours. You had your back to me. You bring me onto your craft—”

“Ship—” she corrects.

“—and leave my first mate free. He could’ve come up here with his bowcaster a second ago. He could’ve found a way to override the controls. I could’ve taken your blasters from you just now, for all you know.”

Rey doesn’t look up, and for a moment Ben hates how impassive she looks, how little his badly crafted words affect her, but then she squeezes one eye shut like she’s thinking hard, and swivels her head his way. 

“You have to know... when you say you’re going to ‘ask me something,’ usually it means you stick a question somewhere in there.”

“You have a choice,” he repeats quickly. “And for some reason, you chose to trust me. Why?”

There’s a half beat and then Rey’s angling herself to face him, seated a breath away. But while Ben half expects that confident ferocity of the bounty hunter that boarded the _Falcon_ , all he can see now is a girl without her armor. Searching for words she’s not sure he’ll understand.

“I get these… feelings sometimes,” she says, and the words are earnest. “It’s not a thought, not like someone’s giving them to me or pushing them into my head. It’s just a feeling. You know when you’ve got to make a choice, and one of the two just _feels_ right? You can make your choice right then without any doubts. It’s like that. I think maybe… you know exactly what I’m talking about.”

A jolt of what feels like electricity crawls up Ben’s spine. His early warning system with an alert. This is important, it says. He can feel himself straighten in realization. “You’re the same,” he says, a little breathless. “You’re like me.”

Rey’s face has that openness again, but Ben meets it now with his own. They feel closer now, physically, probably because each of them pitched forward a hair or two. The electricity that used his spine like a hyperspace route now seems to emit from their bodies, mingling between them. Ben imagines them being able to power this EMP just from this, from whatever crackles between them.

She’s the first to break the tense silence, her tongue darting out to wet her lips. “So can I?”

“Can you what?”

She smiles, small and private. Like she knows something. “Can I trust you?” 

Before he’s able to emphatically offer his trustworthiness on a platter, Rey reaches out suddenly to take his wrist in her hand and pull it toward her. She rotates and then lays her other hand in his, her impossibly delicate, calloused fingers resting on the heel of his palm. The contact is so sudden and unexpected that Ben feels a shudder roll through him, chest opening up for a little gulp of air like he’s starved for it. His eyes never leave hers, not even when her lips part on a breath he knows she’s starved for, too. His heart, finally steadied, grows louder until it thumps in his ears with the rhythmic beat of his ardor. It’s all he hears for the moment, music that accompanies the way the pads of her fingers drag slowly across the muscle of his thumb. She traces up the line of his palm to its center, her small fingers skating along his. 

And then, as quickly as she took his hand, she releases it and straightens. In the artificial light of the craft’s overheads, Ben sees the shine of her eyes, glassy with emotion. 

“See,” she says quietly, sounding nearly winded. “ _That’s_ how I know. That feeling. That’s something you can’t hide.”

If she means to break the spell that’s fallen over the cabin, the words do little but pull him in further still. Ben’s hand hovers in front of him, fingers closing over his palm like he means to hold tightly onto the lingering sensation of their contact. Her fingers have left invisible marks in their wake. 

“Rey,” he begins, the words unbidden. “I don’t usually worry before starting a job. But this one… he’s dangerous. Actually dangerous. Verrick doesn’t hire mercs. Doesn’t like to part with his money if he can’t buy loyalty—it’s the droids I don’t like. He programs them himself. They’re like… little tornadoes of metal. You can’t read a computer like you can a brain. If you got hurt, I couldn’t.” 

Ben doesn’t finish the sentence and doesn’t expect he has to. Living targets are one thing, but Verrick’s assassin droids are something else. They’re tall, they’re hollow, and they’re soulless. Impossible to manipulate without the know how. He half expects Rey to pull some kind of knowing smirk, but the smile on her face is soft and turned toward the wall, like he’s not meant to see it. 

She pauses a moment. “It’s a good thing that I’m confident enough for both of us, then.”

The breath of a laugh he exhales is more out of relief than amusement. “Yeah. Alright. This is... _definitely_ the first time I’ve ever been accused of lacking confidence.”

“First time for everything,” she says, and Ben knows now she means every word. “What I have is confidence in you, and in me. We’re both of us very clever, you know.”

Ben turns away with a broad smile, hands braced on his knees. The dread that clouds over his mind dissipates now with the canorous quality of Rey’s laughter. It warms him from the inside, trickling through his bloodstream to his extremities like he’s just taken a long, generous sip of high-proof Gamorrean hooch. It plays with his limbs in the same way, makes his head feel light on his shoulders. Every decision he makes now is the best decision. He could wrestle a reek right now bare-handed and win.

“Well,” Rey says, her eyes half-squinting with the force of her smile, “maybe me more than you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you've made it this far - thank you, thank you. Just one more chapter left in this story, with maaaybe a little extra somethin' somethin' brewing in the back of my mind.


	3. part iii. execution.

“You ready?”

Rey stands beside him at the top of the _Falcon’_ s boarding ramp. They each check and double-check their kits, their armor, their weapons. Ben’s blaster,returned sometime while aboard the _Goazon_ , came with a with a gentle warning (“If I catch you pointing this at me again,” she’d said, her voice husky in the close quarters of the cabin, “then I’ll be taking it off your dead body.”), its weight now a comfort nestled snugly into his gunbelt. 

When she doesn’t answer his question right away, he glances over at her.

“Stop fidgeting,” he says, fond.

“I’m not,” she returns, and fidgets.

He stifles the chuckle that wants to emerge, recognizing it as a little release of the nervous tension that usually precedes a more contentious meeting. The face to face encounters are arguably the most dangerous part of the job. The longer Ben goes without seeing the contact, the more uncertain the conditions of the meeting will be. And in this case, Ben hasn’t seen Verrick in months, in several standard _years_ , for good reason. 

In general, smugglers and those requiring their services don’t tend to be the most stable of individuals, and though Ben’s got his instinctual advantage there’s always potential that who he ends up seeing is feeling vengeful. Or petty. Or is just in a bad mood. Often, it’s a combination of two or more, which means there’s a lot of diffusing Ben has to do. Impromptu deal making is a good skill to have just to get him out of scrapes with his reputation intact.

If Ben Solo agrees to some terms, he gets the job done, one way or another. Hopefully this is still the reputation he holds in this corner of the galaxy, on a tiny, faraway moon in the Outer Rim. From space, it doesn’t look like much. It’s a place covered in long stretches of flat plateaus, interspersed by gentle, low mountains and shallow valleys. While the earth is just dry dirt and loose sand, the landscape implies it had once seen liquid water. It’s a cold little world, at least at this point in its orbital path, far away from the glow of its mid-sized orange sun. 

Somewhere on its surface, built in the shadow of one of its taller hills sits a low, long, duracrete bunker, a little pirates’ den home to one of the most dangerous smugglers Ben’s ever had the displeasure of working with. 

Rey looks up at him now. He can see the point of her helmet move gently up and down, presumably because her eyes are sweeping over him. “You’re the nervous one,” she says, like she’s going to win some kind of long standing argument. “I’m the one with the confidence in both of us, remember?”

“Right,” he returns, nodding. “Just nerves. It’s normal.” Ben’s not often easily read; his misgivings don’t play on his face in obvious ways. Rey, though—she flips him over and spreads him out like a winning hand of sabacc. He’s finding he doesn’t much mind being read in this way, and if it’s supposed to make him uncomfortable he can’t muster the energy for it.

“You’re... worried about me,” she says, coquettish. “About little old me! Poor, defenseless bounty chaser, just a girl in a suit of armor and a pair of blasters who took over a whole light freighter by herself, somehow, with no skills of her own—”

“Alright, alright,” he sighs, feeling a flush rise on his face. “So much for honesty. See if I ever confess anything to you again.”

She goes quiet, and in that time he imagines that under her helmet she’s looking at him with interest, lips parted slightly. Ben can’t know that with certainty, so he keeps his head forward.

The _Falcon_ gives a tiny tremble as the winds on the moon’s surface part around it. The high-pitched whistles are audible as the air passes over the craggy, uneven surface of the ship. Ben hits the control button with the side of his fist a little too hard, door opening as the loading ramp engages.

Before it hits the ground, Rey voices one last concern, the tail of her sentence rising in volume to be heard over the sound of the ramp hitting the hard surface of the landing pad. “Are you sure—are we _sure_ this’ll work?”

“It’ll work.” Lowering his goggles over his eyes, he turns to her with one last, lopsided smile. “Trust me.”

The moon’s surface is bright. The goggles do more than protect from the occasional gust of sandy wind; they cut the sunlight that reflects off the sand, giving the landscape a green tint that’s much easier on human eyes. As he crosses the landing pad and follows the little marked off path to the bunker, Ben imagines there are killer droids painted a dusty off-white just waiting for them, buried in the sand—but nothing acknowledges their presence other than a trail of red lights that illuminate either side of the walking path, lighting up broken bits of ships and disused engine parts that are scattered all around. The lights kick up a few paces before them as they approach and dim once they walk past. He imagines they might have once been helpful for Verrick’s various hired hands when they used to land at all hours, but for Ben they’re nothing but an enormous illuminated sign that reads _this way to the crime king and his murderbots and almost certain death._

Kriff, he hates the damn droids.

Rey stops a good distance away from the enormous, stone-colored door, allowing Ben to approach first. A security camera droid stirs to life above a computer panel, its great square eye craning down on an extendable neck to get a better look at the visitors. While it looks innocent and unaccompanied, Ben knows there are hidden blaster turrets mounted on either side of the door, ready to fire on them at any moment. He raises a card with a scepter’s emblem on it, identifying him as one of Verrick’s mid-level smugglers.

The droid runs a scan on the card, then flashes red. “ _Ben Solo_ ,” it says in its tinny voice, pitched deeper than it has any right to be. Verrick’s built everything to be as intimidating as possible. “ _And one unidentified guest. Access denied._ ”

Ben knows that while the droid is just following its programming, Verrick is watching from his console inside the bunker. He takes care to look innocent, and gestures behind him. “My new first mate. Like I told you over comms.” A gust of wind cuts right through them, the hood of Ben’s overcoat whipping up against the back of his neck. “You going to let us in, or let the weather tear us to pieces?”

There’s a pause where nothing moves but the droid’s lens, and then suddenly it withdraws into its hole, manually overridden. A moment later, a humanoid-sized side door slides up to allow them inside.

The interior is just as Ben remembers from his last unfortunate visit. Nothing has changed except it feels darker and more desolate. Where once the place had been a busy hub of activity, with engineers and smugglers constantly milling around, people delivering heavy cargo from their holds to move in through the back door, now it’s empty but for the lights that blink overhead as he and Rey approach the main room. It’s separated now from the anteroom by another door—a new development during the past few years. It’s at least wider than the door they just entered, not that that’s any comfort. As Ben passes the threshold, he feels the nerves in his body crackle, as if each one is attuned to the presumptive danger that lies beyond. 

The main chamber is one big rectangle. Ben’s not surprised to find Verrick’s huge obsidian colored table still takes its place of honor on a raised platform in the back. Verrick did always think of himself as a gentleman. Or royalty. The platform is his dais, the too-expensive table his throne. 

While the outside hasn’t changed, Verrick’s throne room is another matter entirely. There are chairs and stacks of storage crates, some overturned to be used as tables. Remnants of food wrappers are strewn around, along with weapons and packs and gear. Almost like the place was being used as a living space.

On either side of the room are four doors set into the metal. Ben tries not to give any of them even the barest of glances, or think too much about the horrors they keep from view. 

Seated at the back, at the center of his big, stupid, ugly table is the man himself. Tall, lanky, and dressed in a fine waistcoat and tailored pants is the one-armed Verrick, feet up, looking purposefully disinterested. 

A human, Verrick is somewhere in his 50s, hair grayer now than Ben remembers it. It’s combed neatly back behind his ears. He’s still sporting his mustache and beard, but it’s a little longer than usual. In his mechanical hand he holds a tiny, smooth cylinder that he rolls between each of his fingers like a practiced gambler.

In the shadows behind the recessed lights, Ben notices forms that make his blood run cold. At least three figures, clad in armor and heavily armed, looking restless. Ben can see one slowly get to its feet as it lets out a soft hiss.

Great. Not only did Verrick hire what look like mercenaries to hang out with him, he _had_ to hire a Trandoshan, specifically. 

Ben tries not to scowl and fights the urge to look behind him at Rey, who he can sense has tensed up like a threatened serpent. 

Verrick has not moved from his place, booted feet resting on the edge of the table. From his hand he takes a long pull from the cylinder, waits, and then exhales slowly, red-tinted smoke leaving his mouth and nostrils in a rush. It looks nearly elegant.

It’s an act. Just a bunch of bravado, long stretches of tense silence and fearsome red smoke meant to sow seeds of doubt, to get Ben to consider how the odds are impossibly stacked against him if he tries anything. Even if Verrick suspects Ben's come for reasons other than the professional ones he mentioned, he’d be putting on this show anyway. He’d be trying to assert his dominance.

“Got my transmission?” Ben says, but it’s not really a question so he goes on without missing a beat, a less flashy display of his own confidence. “Here’s what I know: I got a tip from Takodana that there’s a shipjacker on Byblos. New to the game, but I hear her last job came equipped with a nice cache of scatterblasters and repeating blasters from Nar Shaddaa. Supposedly the Hutts don’t much miss them, haven’t even noticed they’re gone. Scatterblasters are worth a good amount to a gunrunner, last I checked. And here’s the part you might be _really_ interested in: she’s lifted an extra crate housing a disassembled HK-model droid. I wouldn’t have believed it except I saw it myself, on holo.” 

Verrick watches Ben while he speaks, saying nothing himself. From the shadows, another figure has made it into the light, making that four whole mercs at the boss’ beck and call. 

Ben shifts on his feet. “What I propose,” he continues, and turns back to look at Verrick, “is that you send me to pick up the shipment. Byblos is close enough to the Hosnian system that I can drop in without anybody noticing, or I can say I’ve family business with the Senate on Hosnian Prime. I go in, move the cargo to an arms buyer I know on the Ring of Kafrene, and bring back the profits, plus the droid. Then we part ways as even. No bad blood between us.”

A quiet falls over the room. Unlike Rey’s lack of reaction onboard the _Goazon_ , the complete stoniness on the face of a self-made pirate king is unsettling. Nobody moves, not until Verrick sets the cylinder down on the table in front of him. When he opens his mouth, the words emerge as slow and deliberate, in that distinctive drawl Ben’s loathed since the moment he heard the man’s grating voice. “And what’s in it for you?”

“For me?” Ben returns without thought. “Credits. You pay me what’s fair when I get back. For the job, not the droid.”

“ _No,_ ” Verrick sighs, like Ben’s being deliberately dense, “what’s in it for _you_?” 

Ben blinks. He expected the prepared pitch to be a hard sell, but not like this. Not this much instant suspicion.

“You can get credits any old where,” Verrick continues. “But you came out here for somethin’ _I_ can give that somebody else cain’t. After all this time with you runnin’ scams through every trade route in the galaxy, you come here for _me._ You came here for forgiveness. Even though you brought a damn bounty hunter right into my home uninvited.” Verrick’s swung his feet off the table by now and is leaning forward, looking very serious with his hands braced on the table, head cocked. “What, you think I wouldn’t notice you changin’ your help? There’s not a trader in the underworld doesn’t know the Solos don’t take on a single task without that walking hairstack at their side, but the _one_ time you come crawlin’ back here, to me, you hail and say he’s ‘retired’ or some druk like that. So. I’m askin’ you again: _what’s in it for you_?”

Well, Ben _did_ say Verrick wasn’t stupid. The assassin droids he modifies are only part of the reason why Ben’s put off coming back.

Instead of the feigned ignorance he could attempt to affect, Ben drops the act entirely. He raises a foot to plant on the bottom most stair and leans forward a centimeter at a time, his own assertion of dominance. “You know,” he begins, eyes wandering up to the ceiling, playing coy, “you _did_ always think you were smarter than you are.”

“And _you_ always thought you was as smooth as your old man.”

That doesn’t tweak Ben like it’s meant to. Probably because he already accepts this comparison as representative of the facts. “Not so great at business, either, considering.” Ben raises a hand to gesture at the shabby, messy room, empty of all degenerates save the man himself and a few hired lackeys. “What happened to your bustling little marauder hub? Your reputation take a hit or something?”

Verrick’s eye twitches. The reaction is heartening. The rumors he disseminated through the underworld about intentionally paring down his business were just a cover; what he had instead were problems securing runners, regular smugglers who could reliably pull off jobs and return to keep credits flowing.

No runners, no jobs, no profits. Stagnation in his business meant Verrick was losing power and standing by the day. And instead of running jobs himself like he had when he started, he holed up in his bunker instead, hoarding his assassins and credits and resentment.

Verrick’s vanity, as ever, is a thin veneer over an ugly interior. He sniffs. “You’re a lot of things, Solo. But the one thing you never were was convincin’.” He stands, a signal to the mercs to do the same. The Trandoshan, already on his feet, lifts his blaster rifle up to point in Ben’s direction. Verrick tips his head back to indicate the reptilian over his shoulder, chin raised. “Too bad you didn’t bring that shag-pile with you. My friend Esskk here was very much looking forward to meeting one of his kind face-to-face. Been a while since you’ve been huntin’, huh, Esskk?”

Ben feels himself bristle with the implications Verrick’s making; how gleeful Verrick must have been to help facilitate some kind of revenge hit between Trandoshan and Wookiee, two species with centuries of acrimony between them. 

Because that’s what Verrick does, and does well: he over-promises, makes resources scarce, and then when everyone is at their most desperate, lets them all turn on each other. Just to see what happens.

Exploiting people at a time of great vulnerability is the core methodology of organized crime. But that’s not the life Ben signed up for. There’s a reason he works as an independent, why he sidesteps underbosses, rejects working with poachers, and goes to great lengths to avoid any and all run-ins with crime syndicates. But it means sometimes he works with people like Verrick, little men who dream of running their own tyrannical little empire.

What a soulless, awful, _boring_ sort of man, Ben thinks with no small amount of loathing. He can’t stand it, he can’t stand the way people like Verrick, who know what it’s like to be desperate themselves, love to see the same misery inflicted on others, how blithely they like to manipulate emotions or circumstances when people are at their most defenseless. Ben might have been able to turn a blind eye years ago when he’d run job after job under Verrick’s banner, but Ben’s not the same man anymore. And Verrick is.

The better to beat him hollow now, Ben thinks, and pulls on a humorless smile like a coat.

Verrick walks around the side of the table. He’s not carrying a visible sidearm, which means there’s a good chance that it’s his robotic arm Ben must be wary of. “I always hated your pop,” Verrick begins, light, just reminiscing. “Smug face, always acting like he knew what he was doing when he didn’t. But he always got out of scrapes, and somehow, he could do that, _every_ time, and leave with everyone still _liking_ him. You have to respect that. You can hate a guy and respect him. You know? Like your enemy. You’ve got to respect your enemy. But _you_ ,” Verrick stresses the word with contempt, using his mechanical arm to indicate, “... _you_ I _never_ liked. And that’s worse than bein’ hated.”

“Huh,” Ben says, like he’s realized something.

“What?” 

“Don’t know,” Ben returns, and clasps a hand to his chest and blinks, shaking his head in mock disbelief. “I always thought… you kept me around because you just had a crush on me.”

Verrick’s mouth pulls back in a snarl, clearly agitated. The Trandoshan must sense the flood of human pheromones because he comes a little closer, sensing the precipice of a fight. It stirs the other three mercenaries too, each drawing blasters to flank their employer. 

“I could’ve let it all go, y’know,” Verrick calls, backing up into the relative safety of the space behind his hired guns. He raises his arms, a god capable of granting forgiveness but for the way his voice grows more excited and forceful as he speaks. “We could’ve just called your last day here a case of dramatics. Kid stuff. Firing your weapon inside my home, damaging my very favorite enforcer droid. All, ‘ _I should let this whole place burn to the ground!_ ’ I had a whole new door installed ‘cause of you!” 

“Oh, I was wondering what that was about—”

“You drag my name through the mud, leave me saddled with ten crates of unsellable access codes and forged IDs and then you have the balls to come back here and try to swindle me again? _Me?_ No.” Verrick sneers. “Time you learned a lesson, way out here where mommy an’ daddy can’t hear you die.”

Ben lets a small smile pull at the corner of his mouth. “It’s what you deserved, Verrick. And you deserve _so_ much worse.”

Silence falls. It’s so loaded with tension that any movement of muscle is liable to set off a spark that’ll discharge a grand explosion.

It comes from a merc first. A glint of metal out of the corner of his eye and Ben’s hand sweeps down. His blaster discharges before the merc can even blink, bolt burying itself right in his victim’s armored chest. 

In the space between the hole erupting in the mercenary’s armor and Ben readjusting his aim to the next target, he can feel himself take a breath, time winding down with the slow expansion of his ribcage. 

The air inside the bunker, while not as bitterly cold as the outside, still bites with a certain crispness. It makes his lungs ache, in a way that's refreshing rather than painful, like he's taken a cold drink on a sweltering day. As Ben’s hand moves towards the merc beside one that’s still falling—a red Nikto in a modified flightsuit—time begins to slide neatly back into place.

The next exchange of blasterfire happens in an instant. To Ben’s right, Rey slides forward in a crouch to avoid the line of fire aimed at her chest, twin blasters discharging rapidly. The flashes of red are nearly blinding when reflected off the table, but it’s just as well—it’s bright enough that Verrick has taken to cowering with both arms over his head. When he opens his eyes again, all four of his mercenaries are slumped on the ground, bodies adorned with smoking holes.

The air stinks of ozone. Rey, back on her feet, takes her place at Ben’s side. 

Without thinking, Ben turns to glance, unsurprised to find her looking back up at him. Their eyes meet. It must not be longer than three seconds, but it’s enough time to let Verrick scurry back behind the table on hands and knees, punching commands at his station. 

Ben barely has time to do anything about it before the sound of door mechanisms tell him that they’re about to have more company.

At either side of the room, four doors engage and slide open. Behind them is only darkness—and the small, glowing lights from droid eye sockets and chest plates.

Ben steps back, Rey mirroring him. Their backs meet for safety.

From the doorways, heavy, non-sentient steps ring out, one by one. Droid limbs emerge into the light in paired sets. Two, four, as expected—and then more, as a newer duo marches into view. 

_Great_. _Verrick’s built himself two new walking junkpiles_. 

Each droid files out from their doorways in pairs like coordinated soldiers, but unlike soldiers who generally have squishy insides and are subject to bad judgment, these are hulking and armored dead things with only one programmed goal: to intimidate and kill. And now there are six of them to do that rather than just the four like Ben had been led to believe by the last two ex-employees he pressed for information.

They move closer, each customized, mismatched droid extending and aiming its most lethal limbs to point at the pair in the center of the room.

Ben readies his blaster.

“Rey?” he calls, more urgently than intended. “Now might be a good time!”

Behind him, Ben feels Rey lift an arm up to tap at her wrist comm. “Chewie?” she calls, just as urgent. “The signal, this is the signal!”

In Ben’s earpiece, he hears a familiar roar. He takes a breath and then: a wave of overwhelming electricity crashes over them, crawling down each wall like hands made of lightning. 

The pulse is so strong it nearly brings Ben to his knees. It’s only a moment, but for the time it takes to pass over them, Ben feels every muscle in his body tense impossibly tight. 

The lights cut. And then, as quickly as the pulse rolls through the room, it’s gone, leaving all living occupants reeling. 

The droids, however, have stopped in their tracks. 

There’s a telltale sign of their electronics winding down, a sort of mournful whine as hollow eyes and chest plates forcefully power off. Durasteel limbs unlock, leaving each droid to slump over in place like a broken mannequin.

Eventually, overheads blink on above them—no doubt emergency systems engaging—stirring the remaining three living occupants of the room back into action.

Rey gets to her feet first. She takes a long look at the droids, and using the tip of her blaster, taps at the closest droid’s chest. When it doesn’t move, she swings a leg out with force, heel first, successfully knocking the bot over to crash loudly and uselessly to the ground.

Verrick emerges from behind the table, alternating between gaping at his robot army, clasping his now-limp mechanical arm, and punching furiously at his console beside him with his flesh one, hissing a series of curses laced between hurried mashing of buttons. 

“No, no, _nonono!_ ”

Ben doesn’t give him the opportunity to do much else this time. He leaps up the steps, and when he’s close enough, lifts the edge of the table to flip it over on its side with enough force to chip the edges with a satisfying crack. Credits, dishware and pucks go flying. The sudden burst of violence sends Verrick cowering, one arm over his head like he’s trying to avoid shrapnel, but it does him no good. Ben grips the man by the shirt and drags him roughly around the table so Rey can take a good look at her disarmed, pathetic bounty and imagine the pile of credits he’ll turn into.

“Not so smart now, are you? Nobody to hide behind,” Ben growls, and lets the part of him that wishes cruelty on the cruel to manifest only as a wicked smile. “You’ve never once learned how to thank anybody, but you should learn it real quick. You know why you’re still alive right now?”

Ben lets Verrick’s eyes fall to Rey, who only comes close enough to see the fear in his face.

“ _She’s_ why,” he continues. “Because I came here to finish the job I started. I came here to kill you, Verrick. But you’re worth more to her alive than you are to me dead, and that matters. That matters more than what I want. I just decided that now, when we landed, actually. Not long ago I thought the only fate you had lying ahead of you was me giving you a big hole right here where your heart should be.” Ben presses the muzzle of his blaster tighter against Verrick’s sternum in case he isn’t being descriptive enough.

Verrick says nothing, chest heaving. The whites of his eyes are stark, pupils blown wide with adrenaline. They gleam eerily in the low glow of the emergency lights. He looks like a prey animal trapped in the jagged teeth of its natural predator in that moment before the jaws snap closed.

Ben’s anything but that kind of beast. The capture of his target and the threat of violence do nothing to excite even his darkest impulses; instead it makes his insides churn like an icy, turbulent ocean.

The silence lacks any satisfaction. So Ben attempts to fill it himself to power through the rising nausea. His eyes lock with Verrick’s glassy ones as he assumes a different role: arbiter of justice.

“You know what he does, Rey?” Another statement, not a question. “He likes to _help_ people. The greener the better. He’ll get you started in the underground trade. If you don’t have a blaster, he’ll get you one, no problem. And some credits to send you on your way. You’ll want this job if you’re new. Because he’s generous, after all. He gives you a ship. A whole ship, just for you. Might be a little old, might look like it’s been sitting under twin suns for a few sidereal cycles, but make a few credits to pay off that debt, and it’s all yours. Sounds great. Sounds easy enough, right?”

Ben’s words, initially plain, matter of fact, slow with purpose. He’s relaying the tale, one he’s heard over and over and over, direct from the mouths of former colleagues he’d always been led to believe were his direct competitors. People who started out youthful and confident, but have since hollowed out from the unsustainable lifestyle Verrick forced them into. Ben took the time to track down many of them, _so_ many of them, sitting each down for information, but he left almost every chat heavy with stories of sacrifices and injuries and debts so great that running away became their only recourse. More than once Ben returned to the _Falcon_ so morose and clouded with darkness that Chewie would sit him down to ask the question aloud: _is this even worth it?_

It _is_ worth it, to restore balance with sword and fire. Doing this brings lawfulness to the lawless, lights these dark corners of the galaxy where justice does not reach. No matter: Ben’s the judge now, the scales of justice suspended between each of his hands.

He continues. 

“Your first job is buying fuel and bringing it back here. Your second might be a cargo of foodstuffs to feed the rust rat smugglers that hang out around here. Or a holo of Verrick’s you personally deliver to someone on the other side of the galaxy. He’ll pay for that, don’t worry. It’s not much, but ‘it’s equal to the work,’ as he always says. The same thing happens for your third job, too. And your fourth, and your tenth. Your twentieth. That’s probably around the time when that faulty motivator that’s been bugging your ship since your first trip to the Core worlds finally gives out. Maybe it’s the hyperdrive that you stressed too much sneaking around the New Republic instead. You can’t possibly fix it yourself, not with the fractions of credits you’ve been saving up being Verrick’s personal messenger boy. You’ll be out everything you’ve made if you did that. So what do you do? You don’t give up, right? Not when you’re so close to paying off your debt, so close to making it into the next echelon in the kingdom of pirates. 

“But oh, don’t worry. Here comes Verrick. He’ll cut you another deal. If he pays for your hyperdrive, maybe gets one of his five resident engineers to replace that part for you, will you stay on, just a little longer? And just when you think you’re out of hot water, here’s the clincher. You owe me big, Verrick says. So whatever jobs he gets in, no matter how unfair, how dangerous, those are your problems to deal with now. And you can’t fail. If you do, you’re either wiped clean, or you’re dead. It’s a wonder why his business venture folded, isn’t it?”

When Ben finally finishes, a different kind of quiet falls over the room. Jury deliberations. A pin could drop and be heard with startling clarity. Verrick’s eyes have closed, the adrenaline in his body draining, replaced now with little shivers that wrack his chest.

 _Good_ , Ben thinks, and doesn’t let guilt touch him this time. He tightens his grip on Verrick’s shirt. “And that’s how he gets everything he needs. Not because he knows how to make a smart deal. And _definitely_ not because he takes big, bold jobs. There’s no reward without risk in this business, but why take the chance with your money when you can build your wannabe syndicate on the backs of people you’ve trapped in a cycle of debt instead?”

Ben tugs harder on Verrick’s shirt, yanking the smuggler higher off the ground. Verrick might be tall, but Ben’s taller, bigger, and more intimidating, and when the two are this close the difference is impossible to ignore.

He sucks in a breath and looks at Rey. There’s a moment where their eyes meet, Ben’s pulse throbbing in his neck, and in the split second before her eyes widen, something darts across his mind like a flash of light, electrifying the entirety of his body. 

His early warning doesn’t come early enough. 

Ben hears his name before anything else, then feels a hand jerk the hood of his jacket over his head. Something metal, immovable and mechanical loops around his neck, forcing him to turn.

The synthetic arm, Ben realizes as it squeezes tightly against his airway. He gives an involuntary groan.

“Ben!” Rey calls out, both blasters in hand again, raised and trained on him and Verrick, whose flesh hand has clasped around the top of Ben’s blaster hand in a tight grip.

Verrick’s only a few centimeters behind him; he hears the man take a long, deep inhale, like he’s relishing his first breath of fresh air after a decade of prison. Ben feels a mechanical whirr just under his chin: the synthetic arm, now reset, is transforming to expose hidden weaponry.

Ben’s hand loosens just enough for his blaster to get wrested from his grasp. Verrick sniffs as he takes it, admiring the body and stock before turning it onto Rey. “You have always taken a liking to these BlasTech antiques. It’s too bad you’re such a pain in my ass, Solo. We could’ve traded, we could’ve been friends—”

“Let him go,” Rey cuts him off, sharp. Her fingers twitch on the triggers.

Ben can feel Verrick straighten, maneuvering his human shield to better position between himself and the last remaining threat in the room. 

“Look, girl,” Verrick begins, trying for slow but sounding desperate instead. “I’ve got eight whistling bird darts in this arm right here, loaded and ready to launch. You’re a bounty hunter, you know what those are, right? Now, I don’t know what you’ve got worked out with this laserbrained bastard here, but I guarantee you: nobody this side of the Outer Rim can pay you more’n I can.”

Rey doesn’t move.

“I’ll pay you double the Guild’s bounty on me. Plus whatever measly sum Solo’s offered to get you to work for him. You either leave here wealthier than you’ve ever been in your life, or I take the chance to _finally_ see what my little knockoff darts can do. ‘Cause they _are_ knockoffs, but I’ve been promised they hurt people real nice. One less subpar smuggler in the galaxy does us all good, right? Gets him off your back, too, doesn’t it, hunter? So. What’s it gonna be?”

And still, Rey doesn’t move. Verrick’s blaster hand trembles slightly either out of nervousness or impatience. 

“Fine, triple.”

Even Ben can’t deny the appeal of that offer. He hadn’t asked Rey directly, but he expects that whatever the Bounty Hunters’ Guild has priced Verrick at, it must be significant. Even with his empire in a recession, Verrick is a wealth of knowledge and credits. A living bounty is always worth more than a dead one. Much, much more. Double that and it could theoretically be a sum high enough for Rey to permanently upgrade her ship. Triple and she could find a permanent place to house an arrangement of new belongings. 

Rey must be making the same mental calculations; her tense muscles seem to relax, elbows unlocking to stow her twin blasters in their respective holsters in one smooth, practiced motion.

 _His poor, defenseless bounty chaser_ , Ben thinks darkly. _Just a girl in a suit of armor and a pair of blasters._

The mechanical arm around Ben loosens a fraction, almost imperceptibly; his throat is aware and thankful. 

Verrick lowers his stolen blaster a little. “Good, good,” he sighs, relieved, “so you like money. And know when to take a good deal. Smart girl. You’re already provin’ a cleverer hire than Solo ever wa—wait, what’re you doing?”

“Me?” Rey replies, and punches something into the wrist comm on her gauntlet. In the next second, the droids around her startle back to life, bodies slowly righting and limbs rearranging in a haphazard, unnatural fashion. The droids’ lights, red when they’d first been unleashed, have turned white-blue with reprogramming. They raise their various weapons in unison, blasters at the ready. Rey looks all around her, eyes wide with feigned innocence: she slowly swivels left, then right, and when she turns back to hostage and hostage taker she shrugs, casual as ever. Then she removes her helm to tuck under her arm. 

Even standing in the middle of a pirate’s nest, flanked by assassins made of mismatched and cannibalized droid parts, Rey is unafraid and in control.

“I’m just having a word with your friends,” she offers, “and appealing to their better nature.”

Around her, the droids’ weapons cock, clicks echoing off the chamber walls. Verrick, so stunned by the turn of events, lets his mechanical arm drop, body swinging away from its protective meat shield just a fraction.

It’s his last mistake.

“And I don’t work for Ben.”

A blaster bolt whizzes past Ben’s shoulder, so close that he’s sure he feels the heat radiating through the layers of his overcoat. The blaster arm Verrick extended over his shoulder drops, entire body falling back hard with a heavy _thump_. 

Ben reels on uncertain feet, and unthinkingly claps a hand over his right deltoid. No blood. But there’s a sizzle of heat. His right arm still works. Finding his body mostly intact, he wheels around and lets his eyes drop down to the sight of his much dreamed of plan made reality in a split second.

Verrick, on his back, with a smoking hole in his chest. His next breaths are his last, eyes wide and unfocused in shock.

Ben can’t look away from the sight, not even when Rey joins him, blaster in hand. Her voice quiets, deadly serious, like what she’s about to impart is suitable only for men to take to their graves.

“I work _with_ him.”

For a second, all sound drops out but for Ben’s own breaths. In, out. In, out. He sways a little on his feet until the thump of his heartbeat joins the hissing, shaking rhythm of his breaths. A touch at his thigh forces open his eyes that he did not realize were shut in the first place.

Rey has picked up Ben’s blaster and returned it to its holster. Gently, she takes him by the arm and pulls him down, away from the dais and the droids and the deed they’d seen through to walk him into the safety of the anteroom. 

It’s clean and dark in here, like it has no connection to the room behind them, scorched in the wake of their blistering partnership. Rey leans him back against the wall then lays a tentative hand on his chest, eyes on his, imploring. “Let me.”

Unable to do anything else, he nods.

Though he expects the damage as nothing more than a graze on his skin, she touches him with the lightest of hands, lifting layers of cloth with her thumb to survey the damage. It hurts, certainly; Ben’s had enough close calls with blaster bolts to recognize the telltale burn that they leave behind. In the sterileness of the anteroom, Ben can now smell the burn of synthetic fabric he’s brought with him.

“Argh,” Ben winces, but it’s not from pain. His frown deepens the lines on his face, pained. “This is my very favorite coat.” 

Rey’s expression remains serious. “I’m sorry to mark you like this,” she murmurs, but where he’d made a mockery of himself, her tone is one that makes all the hair on the back of his neck stand on end. “I’m afraid you’re leaving here with more than you bargained for.”

He wants to reach out, to take her hand by the wrist and clasp it to his cheek with gratitude, but all he can do is push two words out of his mouth. 

“Your bounty.” His voice is husky with want.

Rey swallows, exceedingly aware. There’s no remorse in her when she shakes her head, eyes never leaving his. “It was his life, or yours.”

It’s one thing for Ben to have confidence in himself, for him to step over the threshold of Verrick’s bunker and know, somehow, innately, that soon he’ll be walking out of there victorious. There’s a certainty that guides him then, like the right decisions are mapped by a higher power and spread out in front of him in bright, glowing yellow. But it is completely another to let such instinct guide his heart. 

Either by instinct or by chance, one moment Ben’s looking deeply into the hazel green of Rey’s eyes, her fingertips on his jaw, and in the next, they pitch forward into each other, mouths meeting in a searing, passionate kiss.

Ben knows nothing else but the mouth against his, the slender fingertips sliding up to curl around the back of his neck. The dim room falls away and so does his injury, replaced only by the need to receive whatever it is Rey has deemed him worthy of. The life she’d saved, reclaimed for him in a split-second decision, and all the countless other ones she could have positively impacted by taking one more dangerous man out of the underworld.

She starts out careful, elbows kept mostly to her sides, but the way Ben surges forward must change her mind—he can feel her other arm wrap around his neck as he steps into her space. Her helmet’s still in hand.

When they break, Ben sucks in an involuntary, necessary breath, but Rey immediately chases after his mouth once it escapes her reach. The smile that pulls on his lips makes the next kiss harder, but Rey doesn’t seem to mind. She smiles too, brilliant, suddenly free of the extra weight on her shoulders. When their mirrored grins make kissing a difficult task, Ben leans their foreheads together, letting their breaths exchange in the space between them.

“I said I wasn’t going to confess anything else to you,” he murmurs, watching her eyes narrow playfully. 

“You don’t need to,” she says and shakes her head. “You’re not as mysterious as you think you are.”

“I’m starting to get that impression. But I’m also starting to suspect that that’s something specific to you.”

Though Rey’s smile fades a little, her eyes remain bright. Her fingers continue to thread through the hair at the nape of his neck. “It feels like… I know you somehow. But I think I’d remember if I’d met you before. I never forget a pretty face.” 

Ben feels himself warm. He’s sure it’s bringing a flush to his face.

“Do you know what I mean?” she continues, and her earnestness seizes something in Ben’s heart. “You ever had that feeling before?”

“Yes, but no,” he shakes his head. “That’s also something specific to you.”

They look at each other for a few breaths, Rey’s eyes searching his. And then, like she’s been practicing the line in her head: “Ben, I’ve wanted to get you underneath me for two days. If it doesn’t happen, my newly stroked ego’s going to take an irreparable hit.”

Blood goes rushing to all sorts of places, but Ben, practiced in the art of meticulous self-control, can keep it together to get out his similarly-practiced, equally smooth answer.

“Okay,” he chokes.

When he doesn’t move immediately, Rey’s eyes twitch towards the door to the main room, bringing the reality of their environment back to the forefront.

“Let’s get out of here,” she says, and Ben can’t nod quickly enough.

“On it.”

Pushing away from the wall, Ben bends his knees and encircles both arms around Rey’s waist. He pulls her body gently to his, guiding a hand from her thigh to her knee. Getting the idea, Rey raises her legs and locks her ankles around the small of his back. Slowly he draws himself back up to his full height. When Rey turns her face to press into his neck, Ben pauses, reciprocating by burying his nose into her hair. She smells unlike him in every way. He closes his eyes.

Ben stays there like that for a second before he begins to walk them out. At the door separating horror from freedom, he pauses. 

“Hey,” he says, soft, and noses into her cheek. “Put your helmet back on.”

She does. And helpfully places Ben’s goggles back over his eyes, taking great care to comb his hair underneath the strap. 

The trip back to the _Falcon_ is easier than the earlier walk leaving it. Rey’s not particularly small but in his arms she’s feather-light. Ben can almost carry her in one arm with how well she clings to him. Up the boarding ramp and back into the cool safety inside the ship; Rey never moves apart from how tightly her arm clasps to his shoulder.

She does not release herself when Ben carries them both into the captain’s quarters and seats himself comfortably on the bunk. Only when he’s securely seated does she move, taking her helmet off to discard on the floor behind her. Her knees, loosening their hold around his waist, now plant on either side of his thighs, body perfectly situated in his lap. She pulls out two buns in one quick motion, letting most of her hair fall around her shoulders.

Ben pulls his goggles off and is barely given time to set them aside before Rey’s hands are back on him, smoothing down unruly locks displaced by the weather. She’s taken off her gloves at some point, and when her fingers thread into his hair again, Ben closes his eyes. 

“I like your hair,” she says, looking at him admiringly. “It was the first thing I noticed about you. And you’re quite tall, in case you’re unaware.”

“So I’ve been told,” he affirms, because it makes perfect sense that that’s what she’d clocked on him from afar. “I’m choosing to take you stalking me back on Keldooine as a compliment.”

“Wise decision, else this encounter would be a lot less promising. Speaking of which—” she leans back a little as she begins to remove his overcoat. Her fingers hurry on the fastenings, but slow noticeably when the garment must slide off his shoulders. It hurts, but even if it didn’t, he’d be loath to stop Rey from handling him like this, like he’s more precious than any and all the credits in the galaxy.

The same care is taken with his vest, then his shirt, but she stills once this last item of clothing becomes a wearer-only problem to solve. As he lifts his arms over his head he hisses quietly, deltoid protesting.

Alright, so it _is_ a little more painful than he initially realized, adrenaline waning. Rey seems aware of his predicament even if her eyes are not exactly on his shoulder.

“What?”

“ _Stars_ ,” she breathes and shakes her head, gaze focused on his chest. “You’re just enormous, aren’t you? I mean, I knew that already, but.” She gestures helplessly.

He feels himself flush and takes each of her hands to place on his bare chest. “You can touch me.” While she doesn’t resist, her fingers and thumb stay tight. S-foils in flight position.

“I’d like to,” she begins, and if her face wasn’t so deeply, sincerely affectionate, Ben would start to worry. As it is, he’s too lightheaded to do much other than let himself admire and be admired. She strokes over his right shoulder, above his injured side. “But if I don’t do something about this, I’ll be wallowing so deeply in guilt that I won’t be able to properly enjoy the view, so.”

Rey slides off him smoothly and gets to her feet. She walks back a few paces, still facing him. “Don’t—don’t move.” She takes one more look at his chest and exhales deeply. “Really, explains the calorie count of your ration bars.”

And then she disappears. 

She’s not gone long. Ben hardly has time to examine the burned and ruined shoulder of his jacket before Rey returns, seating herself at his side. First she applies a salve over the wound, and it provides such instantaneous relief from the burn that his eyes close.

“Better?” she says, and places the salve aside. In her hands she’s got something else he recognizes from his own stores. 

Finding it difficult to keep his hands off her, Ben compromises with himself and drags the backs of two fingers over her knuckles instead. “Color me a little surprised you’re good at applying patches. Less surprised you knew exactly where to find mine.” 

She smiles. “Step one, identify every weapon onboard. Step two, locate foodstuffs and medical supplies. After that, everything’s optional.” 

“What’s step three? Just to satisfy my curiosity.”

Her smile broadens but she’s quiet as she readies the bacta patch and carefully places it over the entirety of the blaster burn. She checks to make sure the edges have sealed properly over his skin and then takes his jaw in hand. Turning his face slowly in her direction, Rey reaches up and presses a kiss to his mouth. She takes her time, sucking Ben’s bottom lip between hers before pulling away. He chases after her mouth, and stays close enough to brush his lips against her cheek. 

“Step three is ‘kiss the captain, but only if they have an absolutely _incredible_ head of hair.’ You can see why this step is optional, and has been followed approximately zero times since the rules were crafted.”

“One time,” he argues, feeling warm. “These rules presume you’re routinely boarding other captain’s ships. Are you?”

Rey closes one eye. “Would you believe me if I said this was my first time?”

He doesn’t. But it hardly matters. Her first or her fiftieth time, she was presented with the opportunity to disarm and detain him only to do the opposite. She came on board and spoke to him like she knew him, made herself at home as much on his ship as she did sitting beside him, working with him. He knows, as soon as she looks at him again, that there’s something to this instinct of his, the one that plots out his next steps, that nudges him in the right direction.

Rey’s the right direction.

Ben’s still close enough to kiss again but doesn’t, waits until she touches him, tentative, unsure where to map him next. 

She doesn’t move, neither forward nor back, and they breathe in each other for a moment.

“I’ve got more directions for you to follow,” she says, and brushes their lips together.

He sighs, shivering. “Raising the stakes now? Unfairly, I’ll add.”

“Perfectly fair,” she returns, “considering the generous amount of patience you’ve been blessed with, working with me.” She moves her hands to the buckles at the sides of her armor. “Help me with this.”

He’d take back the claim of unreasonable terms, because helping Rey undress is anything but. While she wears more protective gear than he does, Rey’s still rather lightly armored, especially considering the legions of steelclad warriors in her field. There’s a chestplate to protect vital organs, which Ben helps to pull over her head. Next is one elbow guard on her dominant arm, and after that, two light gauntlets. All are timeworn bits of plastoid armor that Ben assumes are helpful in a scuffle. Other than a pair of calf-high boots reinforced with thin plates of plastisteel, that’s really it. Ben imagines the kit keeps her light on her feet, and slippery in a fight if she needs to be.

Ben’s hands fall once Rey’s down to her shirt, watching her cross her arms to pull it over her head. The scars he saw while working on her ship are exposed now, their variation and spread on full display: on her forearms, the backs of her hands, and a long one across her shoulder that he imagines continues down her back like a river. Ben wants to touch them, to trace along the small, jagged one he sees on her upper arm with his thumb but finds he can’t yet. While she hesitated earlier with her hands on him, Rey’s willing and open now. She stands and pulls Ben to his feet with her to unfasten his gunbelt and let it fall heavily to the floor.

Following Rey’s example, Ben does the same for Rey, with belts and holsters and pants until they’re both left bare and a breath apart.

Wordlessly, Ben sits back on the bunk, Rey crawling over him to settle her weight in his lap again. In the silence of the cabin, their breaths become all the communication they need, deepening and quaking in their lungs as skin meets heated skin.

There’s permission to touch now, he expects, but finds himself cautious anyway, hands settling on the rise of Rey’s hips to travel up. His thumbs follow the bumps of her ribs until he can sweep them in arcs under her breasts. He watches as she takes a breath in, presumably from his touch, then lets her guide his hands to cover her breasts with each of his hands. 

“You can touch me too,” she whispers, but there’s an edge of a challenge there. She illustrates by sliding closer, spreading her thighs further around the width of his hips, until their stomachs are centimeters apart.

She’s so warm to the touch, and though scarred, her skin is impossibly soft in ways he hasn’t anticipated. 

It loosens something in Ben’s chest. Whatever he anticipated happening when their lips first met, it could not have encompassed the image of Rey naked and wanting in his lap. Of Rey touching him and asking (or demanding, because he’d expect nothing less) to be touched in return.

So he does, with nothing but single minded focus on the parts of her under his hands. He slides his palm down, and just that contact is enough to peak the skin underneath. When he replaces the touch with his fingertips, the nipple of her right breast is hard. The flesh of her breasts rises and falls with her breaths, and Ben’s suddenly overcome with the sensation of Rey’s vitality, with the force of her now fixated entirely on him.

How lucky he is, to be on the receiving end. How lucky he is that she dropped down the hatch of _his_ ship and not somebody else’s.

And like she can hear the trail of his thoughts—or like she’s grown tired of his hesitation—Rey drags her fingers down his chest with her nails, feather-light. The sudden change in sensation instantly raises the hair on his arms, leaving goosebumps.

“Ben,” she murmurs, with a softness he doesn’t know if he deserves. And instead of using her words, she angles her chest towards him, hand curling around the back of his neck to pull him down and close.

His fingers, rolling gentle circles over her nipple, drop a mere instant before they’re replaced by the pressure of his mouth. He knows—or thinks—that what’s important here isn’t the scrape of his teeth, or the insistent pressure of his lips but instead the sensation of touch itself. It’s the wetness that matters, the stimulation. So he seals his mouth over her nipple and begins to lap with his tongue. He keeps the movements slow, tongue dragging back and forth, and when Rey releases a satisfied moan, Ben alters course to a circular path instead.

Rey’s response is to pull Ben tighter against her. If this is an indication he’s following directions, he’ll take it. And like it’s not enough just to be close, her thumb sweeps out, tracing arcs inside his hip.

While it doesn’t hit the target directly, her fingers are close enough for it not to matter to his dick. Already mostly hard, it gives a twitch, Ben powerless to stop the sound that quickly escapes his mouth and is muffled against the skin of her breast.

He feels more than hears Rey’s acknowledgement—she hums approvingly then cards her fingers in his hair like she’s releasing him from duty. He raises his head and, eyes closed, finds her mouth with his.

They meet like docking ships, and he’s sure now that he’s never known mouths to fit so perfectly together and with such ease. He parts his lips when she slots her lower one between his, something seizing in his stomach when she presses her tongue inside to slide along his. Like this is hers, like his mouth belongs to her as much as anything else he might own.

Ben’s head spins. Rey seemingly has no sympathy for his plight—in the next moment she takes one of his hands in both of hers and presses it, palm first, low on her stomach.

He breaks the kiss to look down. Rey just smiles, touching a hand to the corner of his jaw.

“Keep going,” she urges.

Ben does; it’s too much of an intoxicating sight not to. He watches himself as his hand continues its progress, over the skin of her stomach and down, down until he feels the wet folds of her sex with his fore- and middle finger.

She inhales, sharp, which is satisfying enough in itself but becomes twice as much when she mirrors him. First it’s her palm low on his belly, then she trails down with her fingertips, until her hand wraps loosely around the length of his cock.

They’re touching each other. The thought sends his stomach flipping. Rey must feel the same because Ben soon discovers they’re both panting, looking at each other and huffing like they’ve exerted themselves.

When Ben chuckles, it bubbles up out of him, involuntary, an expression of joy in its purest form. It helps to release the tension in his body, like the times he reminds himself to loosen the vice-like grip of his hands on the _Falcon_ ’s control yokes. The sound prompts a similar response in Rey, whose smile broadens brilliantly, gorgeously—a sun breaking over the edge of a planet in space, light rays extending into space.

 _Tell her_ , he thinks, but doesn’t know how to, and hopes, maybe naively, that she can sense the storm inside him anyway.

Because it’s obvious, isn’t it? Her plot had only gone so well because _he_ wanted it to. Because he was so eager to stand beside her, to watch her work. She must know, must see it in his face, in his hands. She has to see the way he gazes constantly in her direction, how he allows her to go anywhere and do what she wants and when, how his only goal has morphed into keeping her comfortable and fed and happy so she stays, so she can keep looking at him exactly as she is now, like there’s no other sight in the galaxy she’d rather greet her at the end of her day than him. Only him.

Finally words form, and while they fall well short of his intention, they communicate more than mere silence does.

“Rey,” he breathes and shakes his head, “I’ve never met anyone like you.”

And though he could stand to shut up and maybe focus on something more imminent, like the placement of his fingers, Rey nods with equal attentiveness. “I know. Me neither.”

Then she tightens her hand around his cock, and gives him a firm stroke up, thumb just under the head. Her meaning is clear; Ben doesn’t need further instruction. But just in case he does, she rolls her hips against his still, slick fingers.

She’s wet, very wet. For him, _from_ him. He doesn’t know which, or if the distinction even matters but he considers himself lucky regardless. Lifting his head, Ben slides his fingers through her folds, moving slow, deliberate, like he’s trying to memorize her by touch alone. He’s warm now, so much so that he’s certain it’s radiating off his face and neck. But so is Rey, heated around his two fingers in a way that makes his cock positively ache in sympathy. 

“You’re wet,” Rey says suddenly, and it’s such a close parallel to his own thoughts that he startles. Rey presses her thumb over the head of his cock, spreading the precome that’s collected there. “Here.” There’s relish in her eyes, he knows it. He feels a groan escape him.

“So’re you,” he returns, more astonished than self-assured.

She strokes him, tight, and quickly settles into a lazy rhythm he knows is meant for him to concentrate and collect himself. Her free hand finds Ben’s busy one, and trailing a line from wrist to knuckle, guides him until his fingers press inside. He doesn’t stop, not until he’s knuckle-deep in her body, until the next time she arches her back it’s in response to his touch, head tipping back on a gasp. She moves, and Ben’s fingers press in deeper still.

It’s a tight fit—his hands are square, inelegant things—but she’s wet enough that his fingers can slide in, and he can do it while she strokes him with a pace that’s more reflective of how desperate their breaths are becoming.

They’re touching in earnest now; whatever anxiety that usually seats itself inside him is instantly cast aside, replaced only by the crucial new purpose his fingers serve in pleasing her. It takes some experimenting, Ben easily adjusting the tilt of Rey’s hips with the wide reach of his free hand, but he finds an angle comfortable and pleasurable enough for them both and begins to pump in firm, measured strokes. She’s so slick now he can feel it dripping down his fingers to his palm.

It’s amazing.

At some point, Ben’s abandoned any attempt at maintaining composure—foreheads leaned together, he lets himself pant, animal-like, against Rey’s mouth, too breathless to kiss. Rey does the same, her exhales high, pitched to harmonize with his. It’s all the sound in the cabin, their chorus of moans and little grunts of exhaustion or exertion, the rhythm of sweat against skin.

She’s perfect perched on his lap like this, as in command of her body as she is of the electronics she creates with her hands. Whenever a certain touch or angle does not hit the mark she adjusts either her own body or Ben’s, tapping his arm or squeezing a muscle to bring him present, as if to ask are you still with me? And if something especially pleases her, she is doubly sure to make Ben aware of it, mouth dropping open on a grateful sigh, fingers fisting in his hair.

He could find other ways to share such gratitude with her. He would dedicate all his spare time to discovering them, heart open with longing.

A sudden wave of possessiveness floods him. He wants to pull Rey closer, somehow, wants the physical intimacy to reach the corners of him he hasn’t even realized were even alive, but no sooner has this thought entered his mind than the build in him reaches a height so overwhelming, it is nearly unbearable.

He comes in the next moment, and it’s accompanied by such a powerful wave of emotion and pleasure that it leaves him gasping. Tears have sprung out from the corners of his eyes, and it’s an age before he can suck in another breath to relieve his tingling, aching body. He knows he’s stopped his own ministrations but can hardly summon the words to apologize, too engrossed by the sight of Rey’s hand wringing the last of his pleasure from his red and swollen cock. The back of her hand, painted with stripes of his come, flexes with the smoothness of her movements, until she slows, well aware of when to stop.

Releasing him, she presses her hand flat to his belly, proud of him, and kisses a line from the corner of his mouth to his jaw. When he can’t react, too seized with the need to breath, Rey presses herself closer instead, looping an arm around his shoulders to nuzzle her face by his ear.

 _You’re beautiful, you’re so damn beautiful_ , she says, or he thinks she says, but he can’t be sure over the galloping thunder of his heart. Whether it’s his mind or his ears, he’s so moved by her praise that it hardly matters, heat staining his cheeks and neck. He feels her lips on the shell of his ear, sucking the lobe in to scrape against the line of her teeth, and it’s _a lot_ , enough to kill him where he sits. He might be dead already.

While his brain is static, he’s able to sense Rey’s need. She gets her hand on his again. He’s not surprised to find he’d be trembling if not for the way he’s pressed partway inside. She rocks herself against him, pulling his fingers deeper inside her cunt, and if he was too dazed to feel it then he can’t possibly miss the way she clenches around his fingers now like she can’t stand his stillness.

“Ben.”

 _That_ he’s sure he hears. The way she says the name, solid and _his_ , gets his eyes to refocus even if his breathing continues to waver. Wasting no time, he resumes the pace they’d set. Free to move now, Rey braces her arms behind her, allowing her to lift her hips to alter the angle entirely while Ben maintains speed and altitude. 

He doesn’t know what possesses him, but when Ben sweeps his thumb up, he knows he’s discovered something transformative. The look on Rey’s face changes, something in her _energy_ does, like the last of her armor’s been swept off the rise of her shoulder by steady hands. Rubbing circles around the swollen head of her clit, Ben loses all sense of time or reality, spurred on only by the cant of her hips and vibration of her voice echoing in the small space of his bunk. 

At some point, Rey begins to move too, rocking herself down experimentally while his fingers curl up. After a few fumbling attempts, they’re able to meet together in a soundless rhythm they’ve both internalized. And when that builds something more in her, Rey shifts to balance on one hand, her other sliding between her legs to help guide Ben’s thumb to where it needs to be.

He’s grateful, then, for his experience in assisting earlier; he knows exactly what’s required of him now. He lets his thumb stop moving and loosen, allowing Rey to position him exactly where she wants. To let her move him is his function; to use his flesh and muscle to pleasure herself is his privilege.

There’s a moment Ben thinks he must be lucidly dreaming, and then he feels it: back bowed, she comes on his fingers, clenching in the staccato of a heartbeat. There’s a noise caught in her throat as she does, and then all at once she releases and breath returns to her, an electric jolt to restart both heart and lungs. 

She nearly collapses, boneless, but Ben’s quick to circle an arm around her waist and guide her against him instead of away. Rey curls up against his chest as he stretches back on the length of the bunk. 

They’re both a mess, hands and bodies alike, but the thought of Rey being as unwilling to break the contact as he is sends his heart fluttering. They each take their paces, and once vital functions have evened out, Rey lifts her head to look at him.

At first, all she can offer is a small, brilliant smile. Ben hopes whatever expression he wears radiates the same amount of contentment he finds in hers.

“I meant it,” Rey murmurs, and at first Ben isn’t sure if he can differentiate what he’s said from what she had, as if any words exchanged came from both of them at the same time. “What I said. This _was_ my first ship heist. And I haven’t... haven't met anyone else like you.”

Emotion rises in Ben's throat. “I know.” But any pretense of cockiness is nowhere to be found. 

She swings her arms up, perches her head over her folded arms, and peers at him. “I’m not sure I’d like to. Even if there _was_ someone else out there, I’m not sure they’d know me like this, the way you do.”

Ben swallows dryly. He gives a nod, small but vigorous. Because he understands. Despite the incredible unlikelihood, despite how very few days they have spent traveling and talking, being in each other’s living quarters and personal spaces, Ben _knows_ her, can read her like a winning hand, like she's left herself open to him, unarmored. He knows Rey like he knows himself. Like they’ve known each other their whole lives.

Both go quiet for a moment. All Ben can offer is a kiss to her forehead, lips pressing gently against her skin for a long breath like she’s precious and deserves to know it.

After a comfortable stretch of quiet during which Ben slowly passes his fingers through the loose locks of hair behind her ear, something occurs to him.

“We should probably send a transmission, let Chewie know he can stop hovering over the compound and is clear to land.” Ben recognizes that he ought to be feeling a touch more guilt than he presently does, but Rey’s stretched out naked on him like he’s her personal bunk, making that absolutely impossible.

“Mm, and tell him the droid reprogramming worked,” she says. Her voice carries the barest note of mock petulance. “But I want my ship back. Not going to steal it out from under my nose, is he?”

“Don’t think so.” He chuckles, and thumbs at an itch on his nose. “Your ship not being Wookiee-sized, and all. Practically isn't me-sized, either. It wouldn’t have much food on board to see him to the next hospitable world, even if he did want to leave us behind.” 

“You’d be surprised. You haven’t checked your food stores again, have you?”

He hasn’t. But Ben can only smile.

“I knew it,” she says after a time, and now she looks a little smug. “I knew, somehow, that when I went to you with this job that I’d find someone willing to listen to me. That you’d be someone I could work with.”

Ben considers this for a second. How few truces are made in their respective businesses is no accident—when he and Chewie run into other smugglers, Ben sorts them neatly into crucial categories: enemy, competitor, or complete non-issue. Rey fits into none of those boxes. She doesn’t even make it into the sorting pen to begin with.

He swallows. “You have. But maybe you’ve ended up with a little more than you bargained for.” And when Rey lifts her brows at him, he frowns, serious. “I agreed to help you secure your bounty. That didn't really pan out. So I’ll help you. With whatever comes next." A smile now cracks across the bottom of his face. "Better than someone to work with is someone you can trust. A partner.”

There’s gratitude in Rey’s answering smile, in the press of her mouth against his, lips too stretched to kiss properly but trying all the same.

“I did find a partner, didn’t I? And he’s as clever as I am.” Rey tips her head like she’s reconsidering her word choice, but there’s a glint in her eyes that makes Ben feel giddy with possibility. 

“Well," she says, and pats his chest in consolation. " _Almost_ as clever.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that's a wrap! What started out as a fun little romp through the galaxy and illicit business activities has become something of a space western passion project that's definitely gotten away from me. I've grown very attached to these two and their relationship and I hope you've enjoyed them, too. If you did - or alternatively, if you think I'm miles off target - drop me a comment! I'd love to hear your thoughts.
> 
> Very special thanks to my [beta](https://twitter.com/eternaldawn) who was endlessly pestered at the wee hours of the morning with my updates and plot ideas, and who did an incredibly meticulous job playing editor; to my fellow writer buddies that I whinged to with my roiling self-doubt; and to my fellow exchange authors and Reylos, who have been nothing but a steady source of positivity and inspiration these past few months.
> 
> Title is an obvious riff on the 1966 Sergio Leone film _The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly_ , and can be attributed entirely to my beta. Thanks for being funnier than me, fam. This whole thing is kind of a love letter to westerns, a film genre I have tremendous affection for. If you're looking to steep yourself in long, open compositions of huge skies and dusty vistas, you can't go wrong with Leone, king of the genre.
> 
> If you’d like to get in touch, I’m on the [twitters](https://twitter.com/boneandarrowart) and I post my art on the [tumblrs](https://boneandarrowart.tumblr.com).
> 
> And, just in case you were wondering - yes, there will be a little epilogue after this. Coming soon to an inbox near you.


End file.
